If you are thinking of redoing your setup, I would go with this: Installing Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10
It gives you full access to Debian on you NUC and does install a supervised version of Home Assistant.
After that you can indeed add as many docker containers as you want and if you want to do this the easy way, the Portainer addon in Home Assistant helps a great deal.
About the missing features of not getting the OS, I think some are listed here Home Assistant Installation Methods