What's wrong with containers? I mean, I run shit using podman and quadlet so systemd can check on my containers out of the box but there's no image available. Are you against containers in general or just docker?
Discussion
I just run into issues all the time where docker causes some weird issue that doesn't happen bare metal, it increases the amounts of GitHub issues, then people have like 3-4 different versions of docker compose for different architectures and before you know it 50% of the codebase is just docker configs