This has been my experience. I don't use VSCode and every time I've attempted to play with devcontainers I've just given up and gone back to a docker compose file. I love that they tried to extract the feature out into a stand alone thing, but the juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze yet.

Devcontainers work nicely with docker compose. It's the only way I use it... Really nice to have it all run containers.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-...