I remember and it was terrible! The OS was never designed to keep applications from talking to other applications on the system. (As an AS/400 novitiate and SE adherent, I should say "practically never.")
OS application management is something that is not as secure as a virtual machine or a jail or a container, so if you miss the days when the OS was doing it, you didn't have the problems these things are designed to solve.
Containers aren't just virtual machines running a single application either. VMs are a full OS with all the overhead that comes with it, including hardware abstraction layers, boot times and a bunch of stuff you don't need for your application but you get anyway because you need it to run a full OS.
Ideally you should be able to have a virtual machine that only needs a sliver of resources because you only need it running one thing but that's not what VMs provide. (Though Xen came closer than most and I miss it.) An ideal VM should be fast to spin up, but with VMs you were typically booting a whole OS.
Jails on the other hand... Well jails are what you wish a VM running a single application would be. A jail gives you an application and only what it actually needs in order to run in an isolated package. You don't get the benefits of having an image you can snapshot or move around like you do with virtual machines, but it dramatically cuts down on resource requirements.
Containers are basically what people want from jails and what they want from virtual machines with desirable features of each and without the drawbacks of either. They're not the solution to every problem and they're not a replacement for chroot jails or virtual machine servers, but they do have their place.