It is just a learning project, for me K8S didn't 'click' untill i tried to configure it myself on a few machines.

There is something about doing it om physical real things that aids learning, like you could read all chemistry textbooks in the world but untill you actually try it yourself it's not quite the same

I think it's important to keep you 'precious files/services' and you experiments separate.

For docker there's a simple motivating case: some services are difficult to configure securely with minimal permissions, and having a standard docker image provided by people who know what they're doing would be a big net win for security on the internet. There are a lot of poorly configured and insecure http server's out there. Think about how many vulnerable http servers are running on routers.