I spent a bunch of time reading through Docker docs and other materials about how to handle persistence. It seems there are two big options: volumes and bind mounts.
I opted against bind mounts since I never find myself inspecting /var/lib/mysql directly (exporting data is best handled by mysqldump), and there are some benefits to how Docker handles volumes.
Linear task: https://linear.app/comm/issue/ENG-1069/figure-out-persistence-in-docker
Depends on D4178