It's a first party supported container solution, and it doesn't have weird, desperate licensing terms attached to it. This is effectively the last nail in the coffin for "docker" on Mac, unless you got suckered into a legacy support contract.

if I understand correctly, the difference is that before docker on Mac was running inside a Linux VM, where now it's running on apple silicon.

This is actually probably pretty terrible news for orbstack because one of the value props the app has is some kernel/os level api black magic to get around some of the constraints the normal apis give you when running containers. This seems like you can use an official api to achieve these optimized approaches instead, effectively removing one of orbstack’s core value props