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VMs are nice when you can't fill a machine with a single task (plus whatever redundancy). Once you get to a single machine, you want to scale up that one machine; you can go a long way where scaling up is cheaper than scaling out. But at some point, scaling out gets cheaper.

I'm not sure where the check points are now, but typical points where cost jumps are desktop -> server socket, single socket -> two sockets, two sockets -> four sockets, four -> eight sockets. AFAIK, AMD EPYC isn't offered at more than two sockets, and going to four sockets used to be possible off the shelf but very expensive, and eight sockets was very expensive if off the shelf or very expensive because custom engineering. Sometimes ram costs go way up for the highest density too.