It seems that you're trying to "educate" me on how containers and virtualization work, when in fact I've been doing this for a while, on macOS, Linux and Windows (itself having its own Hyper-V pitfalls).

I know you mean well, though.

There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.