Back in the 1980s I used spend a fair amount of work time in rooms with a VAX and can attest to their powerful and noisy fans. If you are a pro with a VAX, you had better be a fan liker.
I’d like to say that I enjoyed first learning machine code on a VAX due to its orthogonal instructions and large fans, but it wouldn’t be true, because I learned on a MIPS machine.
I figured, but honestly wasn't sure. And either way, there VAX certainly had its share of anti-VAXers.
Personally I never much liked VAX myself, but that was primarily because my first experience of it was with VMS, and I'd previously used Unix. The difference was jarring.
Later in my career, I had no choice but to use VMS on an Alpha cluster, and grew to really appreciate it.