Are there any significant differences or recommendations to consider when choosing between a barebones Lucee installation and a CommandBox installation for production environments?

i mean, with commandbox 6 the gap is getting a lot smaller, as to the datasources concern, if you use cfconfig that should not be an issue. the only other possible concern would be around needing to create a service in case you need it to be restarted. what would be the setup? 1 site & database on a single server?

Yes, 1 site & database on a single server.

We use Commandbox in Docker, datasources should be in your cfconfig or Application.cfc so Commandbox itself shouldn't have anything to do with those. But I think it depends on how you define 'simple' - I would call Commandbox simpler because it has fewer (or, rather, smaller) moving parts in that Undertow (what Commandbox uses) is a more lightweight servlet container than Tomcat (what Lucee installs use). I used to spend a lot of time wrestling with Tomcat. In the 6 years we've used Commandbox, I think I once had to replace a url rewrites XML file for undertow and that was it.

yes i would agree with sam. with commandbox it helps you to conform to a more portable app such that all configuration is stored with the project. this makes it much easier to separate the site from the engine. Upgrades/moving servers/etc is almost thoughtless

Recommendations: Learn to do it yourself (no matter which approach you choose). CommandBox is excellent if you want a third party to support you in a dev environment or a production environment similar to your dev environment. In terms of simplicity, if you are supporting a single site / low-bandwidth application, it adds more technical debt than needed. In terms of simplicity, Single Host, Lucee Install with Tomcat, windows, or Apache/nginx is more than sufficient for over 90 percent of all use cases. At the point where that setup starts to run out of technical resources, nearly all cloud providers have solutions for cloning and creating distributed app servers, provided your code is setup as such.