As long as the container isn't leaky, the benefit there is that it makes recovery, back-ups, and isolation easier. For example, dev VM isn't where you would have your creds for bank, SSH keys, etc. So isolation of (more) sensitive, daily-use data is easier. Snapshots of VM are cleaner and fast to rollback, etc. The OP was looking for reasonable mitigations that don't make daily usage a complete drag. I think VMs or other containers fit some of that bill.