My impression from a recent crash course on Docker is that it got popular because it allows script kiddies to spin up services very fast without knowing how they work.

That's only a side effect. It mainly got popular because it is very easy for developers to ship a single image that just works instead of packaging for various different operating systems with users reporting issues that cannot be reproduced.

I dont really understand the problem with that?

Everyone is a script kiddy outside of their specific domain.

I may know loads about python but nothing about database management or proxies or Linux. If docker can abstract a lot of the complexities away and present a unified way you configure and manage them, where's the bad?

That is definitely one of the crowds but there are also people like me that just are sick and tired of dealing with python, node, ruby depends. The install process for services has only continued to become increasingly more convoluted over the years. And then you show me an option where I can literally just slap down a compose.yml and hit "docker compose up - d" and be done? Fuck yeah I'm using that

No it's popular because it allows people/companies to run things without needing to deal with updates and dependencies manually

Another take: Why should I care about dependency hell if I can just spin up the same service on the same machine without needing an additional VM and with minimal configuration changes.