> Dockerfiles are clunky and the rather extreme level of isolation is usually unnecessary and makes things overly complicated

I agree, for local development docker is often overkill.

However, for production it's absolutely not overkill. And since pretty much all projects are intended for production at some point, they'll need a Dockerfile and docker compose or some other equivalent.

And at that point, you're maintaining the Dockerfile anyway, so why not use it for local dev as well? That way your dev and production environments can be close to identical.

Guix looks nice - probably nicer than docker for dev work. But is it nice enough to justify maintaining two separate systems and have your dev and production diverge?