You could run it in a very simple container, unshare(1) style. This adds no measurable overhead to binary startup time. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/unshare.1.html
I don't trust VMs particularly more than containers in this respect: Containers have a lot of attack surface, but VMs also have a lot of complicated in the code in the kernel, in addition to having complicated emulated device drivers and a large silicon-based attack surface.