Debian stable is great: it's, well, stable. It's well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.
It's very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.
I run everything in containers for management (but I'm also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.