The M1 and M2 macs have excellent performance and battery life, but beware of the fact that they don't work with Virtualbox. Virtualbox combined with Vagrant is great for declaratively spinning up a quick vm without using any proprietary software.
Is there a reason you don't just use https://rancherdesktop.io/
Because of its popularity, there are so many open source Ruby provisioning scripts you can use as a reference when provisioning your own VMs. You can also package up a provisioned VM as what they call a "box" that can be shared with other developers. It also natively integrates with tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet which make it a lot easier to manage the provisioning process.
And finally, many of the books and tutorials I've read use Vagrant, so it's much easier to follow along if you have Vagrant installed. For example I was recently reading the book Ansible for Devops by Jeff Geerling, and Vagrant and Virtualbox were used pretty extensively throughout the book.
Also, if you decide to package VMs to use in production it's pretty easy to integrate with Packer, which is another Hashicorp product.