Docker is great development tooling (still some rough edges, of course).

Docker Compose is good for running things on a single server as well.

Docker Swarm and Hashicorp Nomad are good for multi-server setups.

Kubernetes is... enterprise and I guess there's a scale where it makes sense. K3s and similar sort of fill the gap, but I guess it's a matter of what you know and prefer at that point.

Throw on Portainer on a server and the DX is pretty casual (when it works and doesn't have weird networking issues).

Of course, there's also other options for OCI containers, like Podman.