Kill me, now. Containers are in no respect virtual machines. Cloudflare Workers, by contrast, literally are virtual machines: your code runs on V8.
A process is a "virtual machine" running on-host with many other such machines, virtualization is provided by the kernel
A host is a "virtual machine" running on metal with many other such machines, virtualization is provided by the CPU
Metal is a "virtual machine" running on microcode with up to 3 sets of sibling architectural state (did any vendor ever implement 8-way SMT?), virtualization is provided by the silicon
It's turtles all the way down
Even better if the isolate is itself running an emulator, in which case it's also turtles all the way up
- These days, it has become common to use the term "Virtual Machine" specifically to refer to hardware virtualization. The old meaning of the term, referring to language runtimes, is (sadly) now so uncommon as to be outright confusing to many people.
- Most other Serverless environments technically do wrap their containers in virtual machines (like Firecracker), since plain containers aren't considered sufficiently secure on their own.