The syntax is a little funny for mostly historical reasons. The curly braces are only part of the record type syntax. There's no ambiguity there because curly braces aren't used for anything else in type annotations (well, except for named parameters inside a function type's parameter list, but that's a different part of the grammar).
I completely agree with the author but during my brief presence in academia I discovered (was told by someone I trusted who claimed to have seen it) that some subfields of biology liked how publishers helped with typesetting and proofreading.
It's layers. Docker is better than nothing, but a VM is better still, and even better is docker on a dedicated VM on dedicated hardware on a dedicated network segment.
To make a bit of a strawman of what you are saying even better still would be an unplugged power cable as a turned off machine is (mostly) unhackable.
To be more serious seurity is often in conflict with simplicity, efficiency, usability, and many other good things.
A baseline level of security (and avoidance of insecurities) should be expected everywhere, docker allows many places to easily reach it and is often a good enough tradeoff for many realities.
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