Complexity is just another part of natural systems. It's not something to be avoided for it's own sake, in as much as we should avoid having eyeballs, because they are crazily complex. Yet we tend to like ours and find them worth whatever cost they incur.
The emergent behavior of containerization has had an overall positive effect, even if it has annoying costs.
> Many websites were better in 2005 and had greater uptime.
Citation needed. There were a lot less sites, maintenance windows in the hours weren't uncommon, there was no security to speak of (SQL injections, no SSL/TLS, etc.), and sites could do maybe 1% of what today's sites can (not saying that all of it is good or necessary, bit i quite like a non-insignificant amount of those new features like native video, audio, graphics, dynamism, etc.).
It's quite noticeable tbh. Nowadays companies don't care about actual reliability, they only care about "apparent reliability", which is a bullshit statistic, and it shows.
We can now push 15 different apps to prod on the same server with completely different base distributions and dependencies, and they'll run the same as they did on a dev's laptop. The apps & servers don't crash as much as they used to when the app or packages would break on an update, and somebody had to juggle actual dependencies or run separate VMs or physical servers to run all those apps, and the configuration management that used to hose the box when it was misconfigured now no longer exists. The site is much more reliable now, and more dynamic, as it can be updated more frequently with random tech.
When was the last time you saw a weekly "Our website is down for maintenance for the next 2 days" message, other than for some government website still running COBOL on a mainframe? When was the last time you saw 500 errors? Used to be a daily thing.
The emergent behavior of containerization has had an overall positive effect, even if it has annoying costs.