It's an easy way to spin up wine prefixes, and it also installs known working environments for many applications.
In that sense - it's actually incredibly similar to docker/snap. It's isolating the application with all the needed dependencies in it's own prefix, with a nice user experience on top.
A prefix isolates a wine install. Bottles intentionally pushes users into a "one per application" strategy with Wine prefixes, isolating the wine install and deps for that application from other applications. Generally a great strategy for using Wine, even if you'd prefer to do it yourself.
And Bottles is a much more convenient wrapper compared to doing that manually and managing them yourself (which I've also done).
Bottles also distributes the instructions to configure a "generally working" prefix for a large number of desired applications.
If we go back to the docker analogy - they're giving you the Dockerfile, not the image. I'm not actually convinced that's such a "stark" contrast. If anything, it's semantic peanuts (and mostly for legal reasons given the popular applications tend to be copyright protected games, rather than OSS software which makes up most docker images).
In that sense - it's actually incredibly similar to docker/snap. It's isolating the application with all the needed dependencies in it's own prefix, with a nice user experience on top.
It also distributes a large number of things: https://usebottles.com/database