I'm planning to use my Pi for a few small services and nothing else. Currently it has my VPN and apcupsd installed directly, and I want to add Grafana, Prometheus and Uptime Kuma to it.
I was going to install Docker to use the last three, but ultimately, is it really needed? I won't be using the system for anything other than these purposes, and I just plan to set them up then almost never touch it again. Once it's set up I'm cloning the SD card too, so I don't need the centralized folder structure of Docker either.
And I'm already using Docker pretty heavilly on another server, so I don't need another environment to learn on either.

So with all that, is it worth installing Docker on my Pi to run these services? Or should I save a small amount of storage and processing power by just installing them direct to the system?

Mealie's meal planner looks exceptionally useful, but unfortunately we don't always have the time nor the energy to cook a full meal each night. Therefore around half the time we usually rely on pre prepared meals from the store. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like any of the main selfhosted apps I've tried (Tandoor, Mealie, KitchenOwl) really support them at all. Understandable since they're primarily recipe managers I guess.

I noticed Mealie would let you enter custom text under a meal planner day, which is helpful at least, but it would be nice to make use of the auto planning and random selection features too.
Is the only real way around this to make a bunch of empty recipes for each of the meals we usually buy? Are there any other selfhosted Meal Planning apps that would support this?