A VM on the Mac will run longer on battery with less heat than a Linux installation on a native Linux x64 laptop.
Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.
If you need to interact with connected peripherals from the linux environment a VM is still usually a much less productive experience. I do a lot of embedded development, and while it is often possible to do USB passthrough to connected boards, lots of things don't work the same as they do when running Linux natively, and I have never found it to be a seamless experience (on VirtualBox or VMWare)
Exactly. My strategy for this for my personal projects is mostly ARM VMs. In a couple of cases I have to run x86, and I run a used HP thin client at home as what I call a “physical VM”. I then use tailscale to connect from anywhere.
Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.