When I spin up a vm on my hardware and run an application. The performance is generally about 70% of what I can get in a container running on an OS on that very same bare metal.

But that isn't the delta I'm seeing, it's 5-10x performance delta not a 30-50% delta.

Why should it be expected? I'm being sold compute with quoted GHz CPU speeds, RAM and types of SSDs.

I would vaguely expect it to not match my workstation, sure, but all throughout this thread (and others) people have cited outrageous disparities i.e. 5x less performance that you'd expect even if you managed your expectations to e.g. 2x less due to the cloud compute not being a bare metal machine.

In other words, and to illustrate this with a bad example: I'd be fine paying for an i7 CPU and ending up at i5 speeds... but I'm absolutely not fine with ending up at Celeron speeds.