To me the downsides on installing on pure metal are bigger than running over something like UTM.
On my maxed out M1 Max I have a VM with Ubuntu 22.04. Runs flawless, I can expose IPs, share folders and multitask with macOS. And it runs very well with 10Gb of RAM and 3 CPU's.
Maybe in a few years an outdated mini could be my home server with Linux on bare metal but for work and play I prefer the flexibility of running on a VM.