There are a lot of use cases for docker, I think this is complaining about a few specific things in more complex applications that probably shouldn't be deployed that way because you're not just exposing port 80, it's a whole tool deployed to end users, like an appliance. But that's not my primary use case for Docker.

For me, the best thing about Docker is that it's brought the average developer experience from "oh, I think I have an install.sh for that around somewhere" to mostly repeatable builds that are mostly self documenting. Any time a tool is self documenting it's a win. If you want the cake, you have to write down the recipe. That's huge. It's forcing lazy devs (which we all are) to just write it down. At this point the amount of "weird bearded guy tribal knowledge" that is now documented in a Dockerfile somewhere is a treasure trove.

Things still break all the time for a million dumb reasons but as a least common denominator it's a great place to start. It's not a solution for everything and it sounds like that's what this article is about. Docker+Compose is not great for everything, so don't use it for those situations. But it's so much better than what was before.