If they are minimalistic and hold the app then this makes sense and then containers are essentially an unified packaging format that is accepted on "serverless" public cloud. This provides a value because you can then easily run your application on multiple providers where it is cheaper at given time.

I'm thinking that in the future your IDE could just compile your project into a single file that you then upload it anywhere and just run.

But the docker was promoted as something different with the union fs, nating etc. That works fine for development but it's a bit problematic operationalizing it.