It would be great if Apple would add support for running OCI containers. Then most people would not need VMs.

How could you do that without running a Linux kernel?

Implement Linux syscalls like Windows did.

That strategy did not work out well for WSL, so in WSL2 they chose to virtualize Linux instead: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...

It's not hard to imagine that Linux binary compatibility might work out much better on macOS than it did on Windows, due to macOS already being a Unix. FreeBSD has been doing it forever, though I'm not sure what the current state is with regards to performance and completeness.