As a person who has been managing Linux servers for about a decade now, trust me that a few hours or days of learning docker now will save you weeks if not months in the future. Docker makes managing servers and dealing with updates trivial and predictable. Setting everything up in docker compose makes it easy to recover if something fails, it’s it’s self documenting because you can quickly see exactly how your applications are configured and running.
Google’s the main backer but it’s technically an open standard. Apple is implementing support in iOS 18 too, reluctantly. Google also has non-standard extensions on top of it like e2e encryption. I wish they would standardize it but that’s a pretty important feature and maybe it’s ok that they brought it out before it could become standard.