I have a pretty low power server at home (Pentium G4560), and the previous one was even slower J3160, so I don't want to unnecessarily hog the CPU with a VM, and the few services I need at home run perfectly fine in containers.

I run pihole, unbound, wireguard, plex, unifi controller in containers, and I run some additional services directly on the host (samba, transmission).

I have a Windows VM on my Windows PC for work, so it's isolated from my main rig (various VPN clients and work files etc), and if I needed some Linux stuff on my Windows PC I'd also run a VM, but more VMs also mean more updating and patching, which is much easier with containers.

VMs if you have enough RAM and/or need to run something on a non-compatible system (like pfsense on ARM). Containers for everything else.

also curious abt this

I am more comfortable using Ansible and Terraform, so I find VMs more suited for me. Though for random nodejs or PHP apps, I do put them in postman containers and pods.