My personal macOS "machine" is a VM running on a supermicro threadripper pro board (along with a Linux desktop VM + random LXC/VMs). The macOS VM is significantly faster than my M1 Pro work system. I should run some benchmarks.
This. Every couple months I disconnect the internet and walk around the house verifying all my "smart" home automation products still work. Sometimes I'll make a second pass with homeassistant (or a service dependency, e.g. zigbee2mqtt) shutdown to make sure I can still physically use things (like a dimmer switch).