I use docker all the time when doing side projects by myself. It's nice because I don't know ahead of time what the dependencies will be but I don't really care. I just pull in all the container images via docker compose and suddenly everything is there and talking to each other.

I find it very ergonomic outside the need to run docker system prune from time to time.

I also value it highly when some open source project I want to play with has docker compose in its readme. Super easy just to spin it up.