For good reason. Oracle's licensing is nefarious. They changed the licensing of the extension pack between versions, so now if you run it for personal use but connect to your company's wifi, they'll get your company on the hook for "violating" their license.

Out of curiosity, if one was to bring their laptop to Starbucks, would Oracle lawyers attack Starbucks?

Surprisingly plausible; there's precedent:

https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...

However, you don't need the extension pack at all to run 3.11 or 9x.

It doesn't run those OSes very well.

Neither do VMware nor qemu, but they are being announced here. They even fix my (almost periodical) choppy audio regressions when I report them, and that's more support than I get from VMware.