dv tries to be an end-to-end tool. It manages the proxy and everything, for example I keep my instances on XYZ.home.arpa.
You would configure multiple containers with dv and use dv catchup to update them to latest which would take care of updating plugins and core.
At the bottom everything is just docker containers, you can wrestle them into any shape you need, including importing data, running custom commands and so on.
This is very much predominantly a “developer/designer first” environment. You could dv build → dv new something → dv ra codex and work your way around, but this is not attempting to bring engineering to the masses, it is trying to create lots of isolated pods of development on your machine as a power user feature for engineers/designers.