It sounds like your main problem is that distrobox somehow eats up the output of the commands run in it? Maybe you are missing some other switch then.
I am assuming the –commands switch does actually run the commands, but does not show the outputs.
Usually when distrobox takes over the terminal as you describe it, it could be boiled down to “taking over” the terminal’s stdin, stdout and stderr which your GUI terminal app/emulator thenr renders out. (What actually probably happens is that distrobox calls docker run with -it switches which allocate a pseudo-TTY, basically another terminal - keep in mind these terminals or ttys in other words, are not the same as [usually] graphical terminal emulators).