If you have multiple media apps. Say radarr, sonarr. You will thank yourself later if you set up all of those in docker-compose, save the configuration to git, mount the storage to something like /media in the container. That means next time you have to set this up again it will automatically be ready.

I had previous work experience, but setting up containers vs VMs was way faster. The permissions of the media between multiple apps was never messed with which saved me from frustrating issues between applications.

Real world actual difference? No, not much. The big benefit is in the updating of all the software. I run Plex, sonarr, radarr, jackett, qbittorent, Grafana, Prometheus, blackbox, nginx, and a few other Docker containers on a pretty plain Ubuntu server. One command to update the OS, another to pull new containers, a periodic reboot for the OS changes and Robert is your mother’s brother. Way easier than running all software independently on a VM.

Edit: oh, and suffer some type of catastrophic issue or have a software update go sideways? You are 30 minutes away from just reinstalling the OS, add docker and reapply your docker-compose script.

Plex upgrades on my nas via docker are so easy, it’s just a container restart. I’d go docker.