I work on exactly the same OS as production (ubuntu 18.04) and still need (not want) containers to do my job. One project uses ROS along with different detectors with incompatible dependencies. One takes forever to build from source, and it's way easier to ship around images by pulling from a repo than tranferring binaries and libs.
And even if I didn't have those constraints, I'd still use containers in production because it just makes testing and deployment so much less of a headache.