It's beyond an equivalent to a Docker container because it includes kernel isolation. This is a security distinction that isn't well understood.
They point of containers is that they do share the same kernel, and that each container is just a different namespace.
If each entity has a different kernel, they are VMs. VMs can be also pretty thin and have shared immutable store for their base image, but they are not containers anymore. Similarly, Xen DOM-Us are also VMs.