Its not super hard to manually set up with docker or podman but you have to deal with integrating and updating the add-ons yourself. I ran out of CPU on a pi4 (due to a buggy websocket client in the end) and moved to a small form factor x86_64 server under Rocky. I ran manually using just containers (podman in this case) and it worked fine but integrating and updating the equivalent of add-ons was a lot of manual plumbing work that I don't find much fun anymore.

I switched back to hassos, but under KVM. This for me is the best of both worlds: I get the fully managed/integrated work of Frenck and friends for HA and can still access and manage the machine normally (and use it for other services).

There's nothing remotely realtime about the python code in the core HA, it works well in a reasonbly provisioned VM (4 cores, 8G ram) backed by a good SSD. There is some religion in the community about not using VM's: it is a layer of complexity and I understand why folks on discord don't want to help people with it, but technically it works well for this class of app.