Thanks for writing a great rundown of what DevKinsta has created!

I wanted to chime in about Docker and in particular Local's use of Docker. It's true that older versions of Local made use of Boot2Docker (basically Docker running in a VM). This was done because, at the time, Docker's support on non *nix operating systems was pretty bad.

Things have definitely improved, and Docker on Windows and Mac has come a long way.

That being said, Local no longer uses Docker and instead uses native processes for the server software (PHP/MySQL/nginx/Apache)

We found two main issues with virtualization when Local reached scale:

Virtualization in general and Docker, in particular, caused a lot of frustration during the onboarding experience
The performance of virtualized software never reached the same performance as native processes

For more details on why Local went this route, see this tweetstorm as well as this post within the Local Community Forums:

The @LocalWP team reached an important milestone as we introduced Local Lightning to the public last week! I haven’t personally touched on the reasoning behind Lightning a whole lot so I wanted to quickly provide a deeper look into our thought-process: (cont.)— Clay Griffiths (@claygriffiths) February 18, 2020