Not everyone has spare hardware lying around!
On it, I run Ubuntu 24.04 as my host, and my guest is Lubuntu with 16GB ram and 80GB ssd for my KVM.
I almost always have 2 instances of PHPstorm open in both Host and and Guest with multiple terminal tabs running various agentic tasks.
I lived with 16GB until last year and upgraded to 32 only this year, which I thought was a huge improvement. I suspect a lot of people are around this ballpark, especially if they have bought Macs. Mine is Linux, still. So containers are the “simpler” versions.