I have wasted enough time caressing Linux servers to accommodate for different PHP versions that I know what good containers can do. An application gets tested, built, and bundled with all its system dependencies, in the CI; then pushed to the registry, deployed to the server. All automatic. Zero downtime. No manual software installation on the server. No server update downtimes. No subtle environment mismatches. No forgotten dependencies.

I fail to see the churn and destruction. Done well, you decouple the node from the application, even, and end up with raw compute that you can run multiple apps on.