Personally I’ve been running docker via Unraid for about a year now and while it was easy I had very little understanding of what I was doing beyond following the instructions provided with the templates.
About a month ago my Unraid machine nuked itself and rather than rebuild it as is I decided to take the opportunity to try something new and set up Ubuntu Server on a Raspberry Pi I had lying around and set up docker on it from the ground up. Terminal only. I did install portainer but I’ve only used it for monitoring, and tbh I could probably just shut it down at this point. I learned far more in a week of getting a few containers running than I did over months of running via a web ui. I actually started with pure docker run commands and then moved on to docker compose to get a fuller appreciation of the whole process.
Honestly not knowing yaml won’t hurt you too much. Biggest thing that bites pretty much anyone going in is that yaml absolutely cares about whitespace. Keeping indentation consistent is essential. Once you get a feel for it it’s surprisingly intuitive.
I totally feel you on this. In my case I got into homelab after also getting into 3d printing, a hobby that really could be a fire hazard if something went awry, and my brain has wrongly filed my new hobby under “all hobby things that run continuously are a fire hazard”, even though in reality the risk here is basically zero. It probably doesn’t help that when I got my first 1u server I only plugged in one of the redundant power supplies and the other popped and let out the magic smoke.