>The dev model of "we've lost track of our dependencies so ship Ubuntu and a load of state" never …

Developer/Programmer/Engineer titles are mostly meaningless because they mean different things at different companies. You can go wayback and call yourself a coder.

As someone that does what you consider "engineering", my current project is containerized because I've lost too much of my life to debugging broken dev environments. The person who ships safety critical releases at most companies isn't a developer that's deeply familiar with the code, it's usually a distracted test engineer with other things to do that may not be very tech-saavy. Anything I can do to help them get a reproducible environment is great.

I remember back around 2009, our org had this horrible open source program, which shall not be named, foisted upon us by an excitable bloke who had heard wondrous things from the university where it had been developed. Well, we had a bitch of a time getting it running. Instructions and build scripts were minimal. We thrashed around. I noted to someone that this felt less like a product and more like a website and set of scripts ripped from a working system. A few of us were shipped up to the originating university for a week to hob-knob with the people in charge of it. Toward the end, during the ritual inebriation phase, I managed to find out that they had never actually attempted to install it on a clean system. This had truly been ripped from a working system. And I thought to myself, "How horrible." Now, I am admittedly pants at Linux. No good at all. But there is something about Dock…

I doubt the real™ engineers at NASA and SpaceX know everything their proprietary closed-source Matlab-to-FPGA tooling is actually doing under the hood.