Yes, you are right, it is just easier for a lot of people to reason with the idea of containers. Also binary packages is difficult to distribute, that did facebook show when the scrapped the c++ hiphop compiler that made a big binary.
"and it involved a specific time- and resource-consuming deployment process that required a bigger than 1 GB binary to be compiled and distributed to many servers in short order"
You were talking about applications in general, I assumed. The world doesn't
end on websites. And even then, people rarely deploy two or three versions of
the same website on the same machine, and thus, distributing its code as
packages gives all the benefits of a package system.
Regarding Facebook, their problems didn't originate from HPHPc producing
a binary. Their problems came from ridiculous size of the resulting binary and
HPHPc having a subpar support for PHP.
"Containers". Strange way to spell "binary packages".