I remember everyone had written Docker off for dead when they announced their updated pricing plans, but they really made perfect sense, and I am happy to see the company recover. A large chunk of the tech world today relies on their products, but they were making next to nothing for it. It is definitely worth it for large companies to throw a few dollars their way considering the massive amount of value they are getting out of it. Whereas my company had no use for their earlier product offerings (private Docker Hub repos, Docker Swarm) we gladly paid money for Docker Desktop without even thinking about it.

What's Docker Desktop exactly?

The thing that I have to install on MacOS so that I can run docker. Is there any other way(i.e no gui utility) ?

I have found Colima to be a pretty hassle free alternative: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima