This is a really nice insight. I think years of linux have kind of numbed me to this. I've spent so much time on systems which use systemd now that going back to an Alpine Linux box always takes me a second to adjust, even though I know more or less how to do everything on there. I think docker's done a lot to help with that though since the interface is the same everywhere. A typical setup for me now is to have the web server running on the host and everything else behind docker, since that gives me the benefit of using the OS's configuration and security updates for everything exposed to the outside world (firewalls, etc).

Another thing about packaging. I've started noticing myself subconsciously adding even a trivial Dockerfile for most of my projects now just in case I want to run it later and not hassle with installing anything. That way it gives me a "known working" copy which I can more or less rely on to run if I need to. It took a while for me to get to that point though