edit: I guess you can cram all of the various Kubernetes master/etcd servers on a single node but whoops there goes reliability.
Docker is really good for dev environments. I've had a relatively painless time dockerizing snapshots of old internal web apps so I can hack on them without installing things into my main desktop environment. It lets me have lots of server things side by side.
Agreed that she doesn't need to use Docker. But if she is writing a paper on those results, she might want a way to reproduce her findings years down the road (even after she switched Distros), or to collaborate with others who want to reproduce/build on her research (and may not be running her distro).
It's easy to think "oh, this script just requires python 2.7", but most of the time you actually have many more dependencies than that (libxml, graphviz, latex, eggs, etc.) A Dockerfile requires some work to setup, but it tracks your requirements in an automated way.
So I'm not going to say "all researchers should use Docker". But I will say "Docker could be useful to some researchers". Just like Source Control, it's a tool that solves real problems. Source Control has gotten easy enough to use that it's recommended everywhere. Docker (or some other container standard) will get there eventually.
https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/relea...
This is not to say that Kubernetes is bad but … it's a commitment which isn't appropriate for everyone. If you aren't exercising its abilities heavily, that's probably going to be a distraction from more pressing work unless you're scaling up heavily right now.