I just faced the same with a path in mergefs and exactly the same message as in RE: Installing docker creates an error
The metadata.db was there so no chance that was wrong the path and I also used the srv/mergefs/<pool_name>/docker. Switching to ZFS path, worked without problems.
It seems that docker(?) doesn't like to be on the such kind of volumes made by mergefs or unionfs.
Perhaps it is good to be on the documentation as warning.