This is not the most popular route and therefore also less supported my advice:
- use a raspberry-pi with Home Assistant OS or buy one of their self made raspberry-pi alternatives Home Assistant Yellow etc.
You can run docker but it's still not straightforward because then you need to passthrough like USB Devices etc, I would recommend against it.
And from there use the yamls to define a very basic config like language, location etc (I'm not sure that you even need to do that). But only use the GUI from there on.
Everything can be done with the GUI, I haven't touched my yaml files in years.
And I regularly upgrade versions too, haven't had any upgrade issues either.