The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.