Put another way: stuff like Electron makes a pretty good case for the "cheap hardware leads to shitty software quality/distribution mechanisms" claim. But does Docker? Containers aren't generally any more expensive in hardware other than disk-space to run than any other app. And disk space was always (at least since the advent of the discrete HDD) one of the cheapest parts of a computer to scale up.
If you go back to the Sun days, you literally could not afford enough servers to run one app per server so instead you'd hire sysadmins to figure out how to run Sendmail and Oracle and whatever on one server without conflicting. Then x86/Linux 1Us came out and people started just running one app per server ("server sprawl") which was easy because there was nothing to conflict. This later became VM sprawl and containers were an optimization on that.
We had to have multiple apps per server before, and now we have containers which offer a convenient way to have multiple apps per server? That seems like the same thing. Could you explain more re: what you meant?
Put another way: stuff like Electron makes a pretty good case for the "cheap hardware leads to shitty software quality/distribution mechanisms" claim. But does Docker? Containers aren't generally any more expensive in hardware other than disk-space to run than any other app. And disk space was always (at least since the advent of the discrete HDD) one of the cheapest parts of a computer to scale up.