I've seen these pop up before but didn't have a specific use for them, as I do all my own containers on a couple docker host VMs using compose. But for someone getting into it, it would seem like the way to go, maybe as a Docker-within-Docker container, or a full distro.
I know Portainer does a bit of this with it's Stacks, where you can choose some containers to deploy a pre-built app, as does some NAS software like Unraid. I'm looking for something that has a fairly well maintained stockpile of pre-configured containers that it can deploy (maybe after editing) and manage. I'm sure I've seen github projects that do this but I'll be arsed if I seem to be able to find anything right now. Bonus points if it deploys a Traefik proxy for its applications and configures them to it.
I imagine there's a dozen projects like this that the community can point me at.
I haven't looked at yunohost in years now. It was my first attempt at self hosting, but I realized as soon as I deployed a service with it that I wanted to learn all the details of hosting rather than use a push button sort of setup. No hate at all towards using that, I just realized I wanted to get my hands dirty right away.
Are you just wanting to make deploying the OS and workload easier? You could build a OS template and then use Ansible to set it up for you in a repeatable way.