I've tried devcontainers in the past and the performance compared to my current setup was pretty bad. This was a few years ago when it was known that filesystem-heavy workloads on Docker for Mac were sub-optimal. I remember having to define several bind mounts which improved the overall performance. I do intend to revisit this solution next time I need to set up a dev environment but rest assured there was nothing substantially more complex about a VM versus devcontainers.