repurposing a Palm Pilot dial-up tool to sneak container traffic past enterprise firewalls is unhinged and yet it worked the best infrastructure hacks are never clever in the moment they are just desperate that the cleverness only shows up after someone else has to maintain it.

VPNKit (the SLIRP component) has been remarkably bug free over the years, and hasn't been much of a burden overall.

There was another component that we didn't have room to cover in the article that has been very stable (for filesystem sharing between the container and the host) that has been endlessly criticised for being slow, but has never corrupted anyone's data! It's interesting that many users preferred potential-dataloss-but-speed using asynchronous IO, but only on desktop environments. I think Docker did the right thing by erring on the side of safety by default.

Exactly. "so I hung the radiator out the window" vibes.