It’s not an either-or scenario. Running services in Docker/Podman is great and makes a lot of sense, as you’ve found. But there’s no reason the OS running those Docker containers can’t be a VM on a hypervisor like Proxmox. Then you get the simplicity of Docker, in addition to the isolation and segmentation (network and process) provided by VMs, and snapshot-based incremental backups from PBS. It’s the best of both worlds. You wouldn’t have a VM per service like you ran before, instead you’d have a VM per group of related services with common networking and security requirements. For example, all of your publicly exposed services can run in Docker in their own isolated VM that’s walled off from the rest of your network, while your internal-only services also run in Docker, but on a separate VM on your internal network.

I’ve never had a fridge last less than a decade. Is this a common problem with your fridges?

You’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. A higher quality product will be more expensive, but this does not mean that a more expensive product is higher quality.

You absolutely can still buy high quality products, but it requires more research than just looking for something with a high price tag.

It’s also often not worth it economically. If a $100 part lasts for 5 years and a $500 alternative lasts for 15 years, technically the $500 part is higher quality, but it’s probably not the better choice unless there are other factors at play, since it’s cheaper to buy the $100 part 3 times instead of the $500 part.