Yes, it's perfectly usable in a container. I use distrobox and the emulator works just fine

I would suggest using labwc with XFCE components or LXQT which has some Wayland support through external compositors.

Keep in mind that labwc is just a compositor and not a full desktop environment, so if you want to have a similar experience to XFCE you'll have to setup all the desktop components such as taskbars or desktop icons yourself. Fortunately you can use xfce4-panel and xfce4-desktop which are made by XFCE themselves and get most of the way there (these are Wayland compatible). If you don't like labwc there's also Wayfire.

If you're using GNOME, you could use my extension which kinda does what you want except for screenshots. Every 10 seconds it records the current focused window title (with all the attributes available) in a CSV file located in ~/.local/share/activitytracket/log. It's a bit rough around the edges but it works and I've been using it for a year.

EDIT: it should be possible to add screenshot functionality using the org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot dbus api for taking screenshots without any animations or sounds. It should not be that difficult to add to my extension

Try using just Termux. You can actually do a lot with it, even without installing a distro. If you want Debian though, one approach would be through proot-distro which installs a traditional distro in the Termux environment. It has some limitations, check the wiki page.

There's also Sharedown if you want a GUI