I would also add that Lemmy is part of the fediverse, meaning it is federated. Federation means all instances “talk” to all instances (unless they defederate), so you aren’t limited only to the content on one instance (or in some cases not even Lemmy, case in point: I’m posting this from my kbin.social account).
I personally really, really like (Docker) containers and I host most of my stuff with it, on a Raspberry Pi and on (free tier) Oracle Cloud VPS’s. I also plan to (re)install Proxmox on a spare old laptop and run some stuff in VMs on that (namely Home Assistant) and might try a NixOS server too.
So really, use both. Use the right tool for the job. And you can also run containers in VMs and even use Ansible to configure everything with playbooks, allowing you to re-run said playbooks when things go wrong.