Agreed, I remember having to vendor runtimes to my services because we couldn't risk upgrading the system installed versions with the number of things running on the box, which then led into horrible hacks with LD_PRELOAD to workaround a mixture of OS / glibc version's in the fleet. Adding another replica of anything was a pain.

Now I don't have to care what OS the host is running, or what dependencies are installed, and adding replicas is either automatic or editing a number in a config file.

Containerization and orchestration tools like k8s have made life so much easier.