The problem is that I would have to purchase a dedicated desktop with enough storage to hold all my iCloud files and iCloud no longer syncs to external drives, so it’s cost prohibitive to purchase a desktop Mac expressly for that purpose.
> that's different than just rsync'ing your iCloud folder from a connected Mac/PC
My guess: Being able to run it on a non-Mac/Windows machine.
This is just running macOS in a VM. For much less fiddling and more stability, you can just run Windows in a VM instead for this use case.