Sure it does not attempt to map fsevents<->inotify 1:1 but honestly I can live with that limitation given that it's a 10x performance increase compared to the DfM kitchensink.

I do go native darwin when I can / it makes sense.

No

> or are you saying you sort of roll your own DfM alternative?

Yes, I set up a NixOS VM and use DOCKER_HOST=ssh://docker@<ip>

If you want to have it easy you can roll with lima/colima (but I found the fs sharing slower than vmhgfs)

> Also, what does "VM isolation" mean here?

The host/guest boundary. The guest is just like any another, remote machine. DsM adds smoke and mirrors to make it look like guest and host are one.

> How is NFS or VMware Fusion more "isolated" than DfM?

It's not, both are VMs and need a way to expose the host fs to the guest, NFS or vmhgfs are a means to that.

Can you say anything more about what you did instead, and how it ended up working out?

Of course, if you are using Go or some other language with a fast, static cross-compilation step, you don't need to mount a source code volume into your container, you can just rebuild the whole container image or rebuild on the host and `docker cp` the new binary onto the target container.