But usually easier than making it build locally.

And more easily repeatable. Plus, it avoids polluting the full environment.

In comparison to what? Making a chroot env for such a project is way harder than dockerizing it. VirtualBox and Vagrant might not be much harder, but are slower to the point of being irritating. I might be missing some alternatives, but among the approaches I tested, Docker is still the easiest way to build and run unfamiliar projects.

Not to mention, Vagrant projects just... seem to stop working, eventually?

I've had this happen to me a few times, always for different reasons, always a huge time sink to debug.

Did anybody else have the same experience?