Sadly the answer my employer has in that case: buy a VMWare Workstation License in the store and use you special snowflake OS in there. Still better than nothing but also a bit annoying.
I am sure it is not a common workflow, but I have done most of my work inside VMS pretty much exclusively for years.
It makes it so easy to freeze the state of a project, do backups, quick snapshots. Archive finished projects. Removes any fear of upgrading. Keeps work clean, I need to know project dependencies when starting a new one on a fresh VM.
It keeps my base system very barebones with respect to software installed. I can also get up and running with a new host machine upgrade by simply copying the vms to the new host.