HA in container and Matter

[silk pumice]

I am running Home Assistant in a Docker Container on my QNAP server. Most of my devices are wifi, and I have some TP-Link sensors that are Sub 1 GHz, that I use with the TP Link integration. I want to start to transition to using Matter over thread.
I have not figured out how to set up a Matter Controller in a container and it looks like this option is no longer being supported.
I just bought the IKEA sensors and would like to use them since the TP-Link sensors are really slow to respond in HA.
I have Google Home set up and can use it for a matter controller, but it is not that good. It does not see the Lux sensor on the IKEA motion.

So, here are my questions:
Is there anyway to use the Google Home Matter controller with HA? Can I use the Google Thread Border routers with HA?
It seems the easiest option is to transition to Home Assistant Green with Connect ZBT-2. This looks to cost about $200.00. Are there any cheaper options?
Do I need the Connect ZBT-2 or could I use a Home Assistant Matter Controller with my Google Border Router, I have a google stream and Google Nest WIFI that include border routers?
Thank you for any suggestions.

[compact shard]

You can use any Thread Border Router with home assistant, no problem. Lots of people use Google hardware as their thread border router.

You do need to run the HA matter server (in a separate container or as an HAOS add-on tho), since that's the part that actually talks to the device via the matter protocol.

https://github.com/matter-js/python-matter-server/blob/main/docs/docker.md - although running the docker container on a NAS OS like qnap isn't recommended, since matter needs some special network settings that the NAS OS might not let you change.

If you can switch to running HAOS in a virtual machine (with bridged networking), that might be the easiest and cheapest way to get up and running with matter.