podman's been great for me on macOS for testing stuff quick; which earlier used to need a whole limactl[3]/virt thing.
you can set it up with qemu-user-static for --platform linux/amd64; i don't remember which i exactly used, or if official docs have been updated for it but looked something like [1]
there is one sneaky bug in qemu that breaks uv [2] for cross-platform targets so i keep having to fall back to lima for that, but great otherwise.