I’ll try to find it later but one indie dev is making exactly this, where you construct elaborate machines by recording movements and item interactions in VR.
This could be interesting. I feel like the problem with MMOs that give you too much freedom is how players with more time will just completely dominate everyone else within days of any new content launching. Also, in my experience bad/unfun behavior in general gets worse the more populated an MMO is (FFXIV being a nice exception), and this solution could help keep traffic down. The only problem is that no dev trying to make money would ever time-limit their players.
[0] https://www.descope.com/