and the fact you need to do a bunch of configuration on top of just installing their repo

Like in your documentation, where I edit upstream files before building the container? Where's the volume? Where are the environment variables to configure Lemmy? Manually editing container files or creating directories isn't what I call "modern stacks".

while pictrs is a completely different project to Lemmy

... which is only and exclusively used by Lemmy and no other application I ever heard of. So please enlighten me: What other applications use this thing?

It reads like you’ve not familiar with Traefik

I simply don't care about Traefik, because I already use Nginx Proxy Manager.

Also, if you read the title above where you read the "suggestion for rm’in the volume is under “I fucked up - I want to wipe all data and start again” :)

You're still suggest recursively removing volumes/ which is a stupid suggestion because that would also remove all non-Lemmy volumes. You should clarify that or give more precise information than "ah, just recursively remove the directory where all your container's persistent data is stored".