This is a cool use of emacs, but containers have made the process of iterative development/system creation so much easier. If you have the deployment story down, it’s even easier. And the configs are much more portable.
The process demonstrated can be adapted to a wide variety of environments, containers or not.
It's mostly about making a literate program, executable on the spot, sort of like a Jupyter notebook, only for shell commands (or nearly anything, frankly).