They're pretty good for most things, yes... but man was it rough figuring out getting my IP allocation routing right on my Proxmox server. The system is issued a primary IP, and need to route my subnet through that to my VMs... wasn't too bad once I got it working... I'd also wanted a dnat for "internal" services, and that's where it got tricky.
I need to refresh myself as I'm wanting to move from a /29 to a /28 ... mostly been lazy about not getting it done, but actually mqking progress oo some hobby stuff with Claude Code... definitely a force multiplier, but I'm not quite at a "vibe code" level of trust, so it's still a bit of a slog.
You could just let the VMs be normal IPs on the network....