Yeah the above is someone who can either greenfield because they work for a new shop or is deep in the kube-aid.

Most buisnesses just need your stated features. Some stand alone VMs with HA that makes them server independent and let you snapshot/back them up with ease. Slot commodity servers in a room somewhere, wander off to do more important things.

The good news is that proxmox is already there, if a bit more crunchy to deploy. It's got integrated ceph to work as a backend for HA/VSAN, built in snapshots and a separate backup appliance that sports Veeam style features. It has a simple config language that could compete with powercli if that is a current vmware use case. Looks like it even supports VDI with Intel's enterprise gpus, although that is early days.

Certainly any cloud kubernetes will be much quicker and simpler. To the extent you can use minikube, I’d call it about the same as a vm.

For large on-prem clusters, you may have a point. I did an eval and came to a similar conclusion, but that was about five years ago. Also the question was “Can we ask customers to do this or already have this for installing our product?”. That idea was a bit before its time