I have been running Discourse bare metal for a over a year based on the “how to develop docs” though I am moving to a docker instance for easier updates and support of multisite. So it is completely doable. You will just have to have a better understanding of all the moving parts. No one is stopping you from doing this other than yourself.
Much like ports will preconfigure stuff like database settings and installing dependencies the docker instances do something. To be honest Docker tries to make up the the lack of things like ports in the linux world.