I used it for smaller scale (low 10s of physical servers) back in the day also. But my problems with that started when i needed a lot more, the sysadmin/devops/whatever story doesn't scale.

Yes, ansible exists but it's actually quite hard to run ansible on a few hundred machines -- you need lots of RAM just to run the playbook and your first hundred or so separate deployments, you do need to reach for something like Kubernetes.

As for LX, why emulate linux when it's .... right there? The linux kernel is not a lot of overhead vs having to justify emulating the linux ABI on an OS the industry has largely abandoned.