> My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone
Afaik UTM uses Qemu under the hood, but provides a nice UI on top for the basic use cases. It also has a library of prepared images, so that your VM is a few clicks away from intention to have one.
It can also modify the VM, resize storage after creation etc.
Of course all of it can be done with QEMU alone, but this makes it easier to deal with than remembering tons of QEMU command line arguments.
Then spin up the dB using that image instead of an empty one for every test run.
This implies starting the DB through docker is faster than what you're doing now of course.