On a local machine, yeah, I think it's pretty situational. VMs are safer, but in risk management terms the win is sometimes not that significant.

In a multitenant cloud environment, of course, totally different story.

I’ve been experimenting with this recently. Running services inside microVMs instead of plain containers makes the threat model easier to reason about, especially for multi-tenant or untrusted workloads. I’ve been trying it out on Northflank and the trade-offs become pretty obvious.