VMs are a standardized system primitive. The “bare metal” bit with RBAC etc through the management layer / hypervisor.

K8s is pallets Vms are shipping containers

Systems / storage / network team can present a standardized set of primitives for any vm to consume that are more or less independent of the underlying bare metal.

Then the VMs can be live migrated when the inevitable hardware maintenance is needed (microcode patching , storage driver upgrades , etc etc etc). With no downtime for the vm itself