I agree on the slimness of Docker images, but if you e.g. have some kind of video or photo CMS written in PHP, then any housekeeping or export scripts etc are better off being written in PHP as well (or even integrated into the application) given how close they're already bound with the rest of the application.

For anything beyond that, I would very greatly prefer to have "black box", extremely verbose log dumps and database dumps that I could analyse over at my actual dev machine, or a good debugger that lets me step through the code to figure out what's going wrong.

I do realise that not all languages have good tooling, or that some people prefer to use `printf` style debugging, so it may not apply to all.