There are two sides to this. The first is security, which plenty of comments already covered. The second, and the real one for me: my tests spin up Docker containers, and I was building a Kubernetes tool (argocd/flux style) that needs a real cluster in the sandbox. In a container that means Docker-in-Docker, which always felt hacky. A VM is just a normal Linux box where Docker and k8s run like they do everywhere else. A separate user can't give you that, it shares your one kernel and whatever's already installed on the host.