Sharing this with the community because I have found self-maintained fully sandboxed environments for CLI very liberating, alleviating my security concerns of bricking my host machines while providing great persistence. Having it as a lightweight self-contained native and reproducible headless VM for development workflows is quite refreshing, and something which I don't find documented enough.

Arguably, this workflow is more ergonomic than Docker for iterative dev work because the VM’s disk persists like a normal machine, so you just install things and move on without thinking about image layers, committing containers, or rebuilding to make changes stick.