Why? Personal projects aren't more stable or bound to a single provider. If anything, personal projects may benefit more from a deployment strategy that makes it quite trivial to move everything around and automatically restart a service in a way that automatically takes dependencies into account.
> Considering that it's likely we might change our personal infrastructure less than one every year
In my experience, personal projects tend to be more susceptible to infrastructure changes as they are used to experiment stuff.
> and I've never got a case when an unmaintained docker setup can run 6 months later,
The relevant point is that the system is easier to maintain when things go wrong and no one is looking or able to react in a moment's notice. It doesn't matter if you decide to shutdown a service 3 or 4 months after you launch it because that's not the usecase.
> I'm not sure if the value for portable is that high.
That assertion is only valid if you compare Docker and docker-compose with an alternative, which you didn't. When compared with manual deployment there is absolutely no question that Docker is by far a better deployment solution, even if we don't take into account the orchestration funtionalities.
I look at this from a different perspective: I have plenty of actual things to do, personal infra should be the least of my concerns and I should be able get them up and running in least amount of time.
> I've never got a case when an unmaintained docker setup can run 6 months later
It really depends on the well-being of the host and the containerized application. I have plenty of containers running for more than a year without a single hiccup.
I’ll let you know my kids personally disagrees with you on this one if Plex on the TV or iPad suddenly doesn’t work.
Being able to easily migrate apps is super nice to when changing hardware/server.