I deploy everything everywhere with docker, because then the only thing installed on the system is dockerd. I can deploy identically on different distributions; I don't need to know anything about the host or keep track of files on the host.

I can keep all of my build artifacts in a docker image repository with versions. I can deploy any version on any host without worrying about copying the version to the host.

Whether your deploy is 1000000 files or 1, this system has clear advantages to copying things to the base server OS and turning it into a snowflake.