Agreed. Packaging is different than deployment. Devs should return to the art of packaging, such that their software can be then deployed into containers, VMs, micro VMs, whatever. That is what packaging allows, re-use.

This is the sort of behavior Nix encourages (disclaimer: I work at https://flox.dev , using Nix as our baseline tech). Docker as both a packaging and deployment format can carry a bit of weight, but can quickly get out of hand.