Full caveat - not personally into immutable, 90% of the time I'm in Debian or a derivative. 9% arch or derivative. 1% work requirements made me have to use something else.

So I'm less making a rec on method and more commenting on this:

I've read that containers are preferred for development, but they aren't persistent

They absolutely can be, thats the point of mounting volumes. I don't want to do the same thing more than once, so whether I'm playing with something stupid at home or I'm doing something critical at work, I'm going to make a spot for any and all changes I might want to make to use it again elsewhere, without much effort. That could mean mapping a directory to a volume, setting specific variables in my compose/kompose, having a container grab data from elsewhere every time it starts, or whatever, but the parts I want persistent are, the parts I want variable are.

Keeping whether or not containers are the "right" way on an immutable distro aside, what isn't persistent for you that should be?