the one thing linux really hasnt been made on par with winblows yet is the dreadful amount of options for android simulation -the most popular choice seems to be Waydroid, but its such an unneeded hassle to set up at all -genymotion is just slow -and than you have things like android x86 which entirely defeat the point of an emulator
Apparently you never had a look at it. Getting Android to run on x86 is by far not trivial these days. To make it work, Android-x86 has a lot of modifications over AOSP, including drivers, HAL and a lot more.
Just checkout their Git to see what they had to do to get it working.
I am intimately familiar, it is not highly customized for VMs, it is as generic as it can be. a lot of work was put into making it work on x86 as a whole, but not just VMs.
Ever seen a single instance in the real world where this is running outside of a VM?
Yes. Many. Blisslabs has partnerd with EIDU to work on tablets for low income countries. I personally have sold android boxes with Bliss. Ax86 has a large number of sponsors that are/were casinos. There are people working on using it in cars. 2-In-1s. ETC.
VMs are the minority use case…