Nowhere in what makes a proper container does a VM come into play, unless we are speaking about Docker and the idea of shipping a full blown OS in a zip, to work across heterogeneous hardware.
Yeah so the Docker daemon on a Mac is run inside of a VM.
Because they bundle a x86 GNU/Linux package as a runtime.
It doesn't work bare metal for the new macs, and it is extra bloat instead of making use of macOS capabilities.
Actually, I believe one text file is the docker killer feature.