the simplest one (and the one we're targetting) is multi-tenant services. You want to sandbox your service so that it doesn't affect the rest of the services running.
<shameless plug> We're building a container runtime to do this, and we are comparing alternatives, that's how we got there: https://github.com/urunc-dev/urunc</shameless plug>
a number of reasons -- power budget, form factor, experimenting as a testbed for more "elaborate" setups (like robotics combined with a low-end TPU like the coral, or a jetson nano)
consider that you can take advantage of all the cloud-native goodies, all wrapped up in a 10x5 box with 5-10W (or 25-30W if you consider jetson boards).
<shameless plug> We're building a container runtime to do this, and we are comparing alternatives, that's how we got there: https://github.com/urunc-dev/urunc</shameless plug>