I fundamentally agree--yet, at the same time, it'd be so nice if a paper could just point to a URL for a Docker container, and you could pull it and immediately execute the program.
But hardware obsolescence is a valid issue, too. That's why I suggested Bochs as a lowest common denominator in another comment.
As mentioned in the article, performance should be secondary when thinking about recomputation. A reasonable solution to the large downloads necessary is to spin up the VM on the server side and allow access to it either through the browser or through a terminal login.