the one thing linux really hasnt been made on par with winblows yet is the dreadful amount of options for android simulation -the most popular choice seems to be Waydroid, but its such an unneeded hassle to set up at all -genymotion is just slow -and than you have things like android x86 which entirely defeat the point of an emulator
Ever seen a single instance in the real world where this is running outside of a VM?
Yes. Many. Blisslabs has partnerd with EIDU to work on tablets for low income countries. I personally have sold android boxes with Bliss. Ax86 has a large number of sponsors that are/were casinos. There are people working on using it in cars. 2-In-1s. ETC.
VMs are the minority use case…