From what I've seen, standardizing delivery through registries and runtimes does reduce friction, but containers mostly move operational complexity around rather than eliminate it. You still get image sprawl, registry auth and storage quotas, supply chain issues like unsigned images, runtime quirks between runc and crun, and networking and storage headaches when an orchestrator like Kubernetes turns deployment into an availability and observability problem.
If you want the gains mentioned, you have to invest in governance: immutable tags, automated image scanning with Trivy, signing with cosign, and sensible image retention policies in your registry. Accept the tradeoff that you will be operating a distributed control plane and therefore need real observability like Prometheus plus request and limit discipline or you'll get the utilization benefits in graphs only while production quietly melts down.
If you want the gains mentioned, you have to invest in governance: immutable tags, automated image scanning with Trivy, signing with cosign, and sensible image retention policies in your registry. Accept the tradeoff that you will be operating a distributed control plane and therefore need real observability like Prometheus plus request and limit discipline or you'll get the utilization benefits in graphs only while production quietly melts down.