Personally, I've been running with Caddy in front of Docker (compose) for most of my personal/hobby usage. If it's a straight website, I'll let Caddy serve the contents directly... for "web apps" I'll pretty much containerize all the things and use caddy for TLS termination and reverse-proxy duties to the app running under Docker...

Mostly ~/apps/appname, where each appname has a docker compose file, and the data directories mounted under appname... I can compose down and (s)ftp the data out for hard archives or to move a site/service. I had been running a few VMs under a dedicated server, but switched to separate VPSes on OVH. Only gotcha with OVH is if you want to run mail, you want to avoid the local zone VMs that don't allow mail hosting.

YMMV

My home setup is kind of this but it's unraid running the containers and one of them is an nginx thingy specifically designed for reverse proxying other services.

This is more or less how I do it, too. Debating switching from Debian to something like Flatcar which is container-first with an immutable system/OS.

I think FreeBSD has some interesting technical merits, but like it or not Docker is the default for a lot of open source software, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to translate everything to freebsd jails.