I've been trying to game on mac via a VM (I know I know don't say it), and one option is to take a windows 11 ARM build, and strip everything out of it. It works....okay.

I actually game on a Mac and have had fairly good luck with VMWare Fusion. Granted, I'm not playing the cutting-edge stuff, but I just finished Typing of the Dead: Overkill entirely inside a VM with no apparent problems. I have an i9 CPU, purchased the Macbook about a month before the M1 was announced.

I'm actually a bit surprised though; what's the compatibility like in the ARM build of Windows 11?

Its decent. Forget about any modern DX12 games, but I can count on one hand the number of games that have not worked properly outside of that. Considering the type of games I play now-a-days, it's not too terrible of a loss to be honest.

If I am in the mood for something that doesn't work or more modern than say The Witcher 3, I just boot up the desktop in windows. Its like the best of everything: I don't have to use the hell that is Windows 11 for general computing and I can treat the desktop as a compute server when I am crunching numbers.

Alas, this is not Windows XP Embedded. Microsoft regressed from this along time ago.

Kinda like Windows Server Core but for client GUI Windows would be nice. I feel like Windows Professional isn't really professional enough for my taste. The included features lack and the defaults are awful.