In your shoes, I would ask Larry Ellison to acquire you and then boot it on a MacPro 7,1 to be released with every layered application that DEC ever sold, plus ORACLE for VMS and the whole documentation suite on readthedocs --oh and a VSL (sort of like WSL2 in Windows10) with one of the nicer window managers from the Linux world. I know his current plan is to take on Werner's cloud but he doesn't have enough heartbeats left to see that through, whereas this plan legitimately does for ORACLE what buying Next Inc. (and switching to Intel processors) did for/to Apple. Peace.

Wow, that's recent!

I hope they are optimizing the design to run in a VM, with drivers only for fake VM devices, one of each kind.

Err...why? VMS has dealt with real hw for years.....

Because chasing behind current hardware is a massive waste of time when your only legitimate real purpose is to provide a stable, performant place to run legacy software systems. Let Linux or BSD do the endless, thankless job of rewriting drivers.