I have very similar setup, with homelab and separate cheap VPS. In similar manner I have all the services installed directly on the OS but I'm starting to run into issues where I started to consider using docker. I run nginx with multiple (~10) node apps running through PM2. While this works ok-ish, I'm not happy that if for example one of my apps needs some packages installed, I need to do it for the whole server (ffmpeg, imageMagick, etc.). Other problem is that I can easily run into compatibility problems if I upgraded node.js for example. And if there was some vulnerability in some of the node_packages any of the projects use, the whole server is compromised. I think docker can be quite an easy solution to most of these problems.