Plain docker is useful when running some simple containers, or even one-off things. A lot of people thing about containers as long running services, but there’s also many containers that are for running essentially a single command to completion and then shuts down.
There’s also alternate ways to handle containers, for example Podman is typically used with systemd services as unlike Docker it doesn’t work through a persistent daemon, so the configuration goes to a service.
I typically skip the docker-compose for simple containers, and turn to compose for either containers with loads of arguments or multi-container things.
Also switching between Docker and Podman depending on the machine and needs.