[starfallg]

That same issues exists with docker containers. You can also build a pipeline to deploy very barebones VMs that contain the kernel, a barebones userland and the application. Use KSM to minimise memory usage. What you get with containers is a shared page cache and reduced context switching.

Once upon a time in tech, the thinking was hardware is cheap, technical staff is expensive, hence we moved on to systems and programming languages that saved us time at the expense of efficiency on the hardware.

20 years on, the cost equation hasn't changed. In fact, its probably shifted drastically towards the extremes. We'd likely save more energy by eliminating crypto mining than moving all VMs onto containers.