I'm using proxmox now with lots of lxc containers. Prior to that, I used bare metal.

VMs were never really an option for me because the overhead is too high for the low power machines I use -- my entire empire of dirt doesn't have any fans, it's all fanless PCs. More reliable, less noise, less energy, but less power to throw at things.

Stuff like docker I didn't like because it never really felt like I was in control of my own system. I was downloading a thing someone else made and it really wasn't intended for tinkering or anything. You aren't supposed to build from source in docker as far as I can tell.

The nice thing about proxmox's lxc implementation is I can hop in and change things or fix things as I desire. It's all very intuitive, and I can still separate things out and run them where I want to, and not have to worry about keeping 15 different services running on the same version of whatever common services are required.