Upthread the implication seems to be that smolmachines would be in some way a replacement for orbstack to run docker containers

But it seems more like a completely different way to run isolated workloads?

smol machines is a virtual machine, akin to firecracker but designed to run locally as well

It also has container-inages support built-in with crun so you can create a VM with a container running by default.

You can also just... run docker inside of it.