Docker is more than enough for most of the setups TBH, prometheus and what will work just as well. I would never recommend K8 locally, if you can even avoid docker it's a win.

It's just a matter of preferences, where you want to invest your time to learn etc... Kubernetes being the fully fledged "state-of-the-art"

I would just recommend the work of Stefan Prodan who's repository and blog are full of open and well thought devops work, even if you are just interested in K8 or only Docker