If so, that’s pathetic and weird.

Pathetic and weird is complaining about downvotes when they don’t even tally up anywhere. So not only were they meaningless to begin with, they’re not even as useful as they are on Reddit.

I did downvote, not because of disagreeing with me, but because

The issue with LXC is that it doesn’t set the software up for you.

is factually wrong in this context. You can absolutely distribute software in an LXC. I even pointed you directly at one such repository of hundreds of images that do exactly that. And they’re repeatable and troubleshoot-able all the same. The script that a dev would publish would be doing literally the same exact thing as a dockerfile.

A dockerfile is just a glorified script. Treating it as if it’s something different is intellectually dishonest. Anything in a docker can be edited/modified the same as an LXC. docker exec -it <> /bin/bash puts a user in the same position as being in an LXC container. Once again. Aside from some additional networking stuff, Docker was literally based on LXC and is more or less functionally the same. Even in their own literature they only claim that they’ve enhanced LXC by adding management to it… (https://www.docker.com/blog/lxc-vs-docker/) Except Proxmox can manage an LXC just fine… LXD as well.

As far as CI/CD stuff… It works on LXC containers as well… Here’s an example from 3 years ago that I found literally in 10 seconds searching for LXC ci/cd https://gitlab.com/oronomo/docker-distrobuilder.

Also you can even take a DOCKERFILE and other OCI compliant images and push them directly into an LXC natively. https://www.buzzwrd.me/index.php/2021/03/10/creating-lxc-containers-from-docker-and-oci-images/ (Create LXC containers using docker images section).

like pretty much the entire development community does?

This is also a bullshit appeal/fallacy. The VAST majority of development communities don’t use ANY form of containerization. It’s only a subset that works on cloud platforms that now push into it… It’s primarily your exposure to self-hosted communities that makes you believe this. But it’s far (really far) from true. Most developers I work with professionally have no idea what docker is other than maybe have heard about it from somewhere or another. It’s people like me who take their shit and publish it into a container and show them that they understand and learn more about it. And even in that environment, production tends to not be in docker at all (usually kubernetes, Openshift, Rancher, or other platforms that do not use the Docker Runtime) but that choice is solely up to the container publisher.

I didn’t like docker for the longest time

Good for you? I see docker as a useful tool for some specific stuff. But there’s very few if any cases where I would take Docker over an LXC setup, even in production. I don’t hate or love docker (or LXC for that matter). However… I find I get better performance, lower overhead, and better maintainability with LXC. So that’s what I use. I don’t delude myself that LXCs are somehow not containers… and that Docker does anything different than any other container platform.