I'm constantly aggravated by various quirks of containers, and don't really remember any big problems with non-containerized infra.
A random and non-exhausting list of things that bother me from time to time:
— Must build an image before deploying and it takes time, so deploys are slow (of course we use CI to do it, it's not manual).
— If I need quick hot fix RIGHT NOW, I can't just log in, change couple of lines and restart, must go through full deploy cycle.
— Must remember that launched containers do not close when ssh breaks connection and they can easily linger for a couple of weeks.
I generally find it harder to change how things work together. It's probably possible to spend lots of effort to fix these things, but I don't remember having to do all this cruft with old school infrastructure.
Hence the question - has anyone migrated off containerized infrastructure? Are you satisfied? Or I'm misremembering things and horrible things wait for me in the old-school ways?
What you are complaining about isn't really containers (you could still pretty easily run stuff in a container and set it up/treat it like a "pet" rather than "cattle"), it's the CI/CD and immutable infrastructure best practices you are really sad about. Your complaints are totally valid: but there is another side to it.
Before adopting containers it wasn't unusual to SSH in and change a line of code on a broken server and restart. In fact that works fine while the company/team is really small. Unfortunately it becomes a disaster and huge liability when the team grows.
Additionally in regulated environments (think a bank or healthcare) one person with the ability to do that would be a huge threat. Protecting production data is paramount and if you can modify the code processing that data without a person/thing in your way then you are a massive threat to the data. I know you would never do something nefarious - neither would I. We just want to build things. But I promise you it's a matter of time until you hire somebody that does. And as a customer, I'd rather not trust my identity to be protected because "we trust Billy. He would never do that."
I pine for the old days - I really do. Things are insanely complex now and I don't like it. Unfortunately there are good reasons for the complexity.