> Developers don't want a VM and you can't manage and maintain VMs if someone else is doing something with them.

I want a VM because I want my dev environment to exactly replicate the production environment, down to the kernel. It also means that if I leave my employer I can just delete my VM on my personal machine.

We've also not had any issues with maintaining production VMs, our release pipeline packages up our code into a debian package and them creates a VM image from that. This is then deployed across all regions. If you need to roll back just deploy the previous VM image version. GCP handles killing old instances and starting new instances for you.