A base install isn't too hard, correct. The main downside there is that a full LaTeX distribution is gigabytes in size, but that's manageable. Just takes time. Leaving out docs or using a distribution with on-the-fly package installation can solve this.

Trouble arises when you're looking to use latexmk (requires Perl), bib2gls (requires a Java runtime), minted (requires Python), latexindent (requires specific Perl libraries), including SVG (requires InkScape, and I believe ImageMagick), ...

Any notion of a powerful, sane, batteries-included development environment (think Rust and Go) requires jumping through insane hoops, resulting in bespoke setups, always on the brink of breakage. I really don't want to manage Python venvs!

The LaTeX crowd is very old school and tooling isn't natively available or built with containerization in mind. I've grown to like single-binary approaches (Caddy, typst, ...). I find vanilla LaTeX documents (the type that will compile in 20 years to come) very weak. UTF-8 still isn't standard in "vanilla LaTeX" (pdflatex)!