add me as well. I learned about incus from HN ~a month ago, and was poking an idea of having a "development base image". The advantage compared to containers, is that you can hot-plug devices to the running instance: mounts, secrets, etc. incus also supports --vm and container mode with minimal difference in cli commands.

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

my main bottleneck was exactly in usability: how to make it least effort to spin up per use case and keep the set of operating scripts small - i didn't want to build an app for this, just shortcuts to use existing app.