Just cause you’ve never seen them doesn’t make it not true.
Try using quadlet and a .container file on current Debian stable. It doesn’t work. Architecture changed, quadlet is now recommended.
Try setting device permissions in the container after updating to Debian testing. Also doesn’t work the same way. Architecture changed.
Redhat hasn’t ruined it yet, but Ansible should provide a pretty good idea of the potential trajectory.
The answer to your overarching question is not “common maintenance procedures”, but “change management processes”
When things change, things can break. Immutable OSes and declarative configuration notwithstanding.
OS and Configuration drift only actually matter if you’ve got a documented baseline. That’s what your declaratives can solve. However they don’t help when you’re tinkering in a home server and drifting your declaratives.
This right here is the attitude that’s going to undermine everything you’re asking. There’s nothing about containers that is inherently “safer” than running native OS packages or even building your own. Containerization is about scalability and repeatability, not availability or reliability. It’s still up to you to monitor changelogs and determine exactly what is going to break when you pull the latest docker image. That’s no different than a native package.