Generally speaking:

• just want it to work with minimal effort: containers
• need very custom things, or very high efficiency: bare metal
• need high security, emulating bare metal, or like to do extra IT work: virtualization

Generally, these days, containers win 99% of the time as the best home lab backbone.

Rootkits

Sadly it is actually one of the biggest security features that modern computers have

Lol, you suck

Telemetry is fine, it’s the abuse of it that is the problem.

If a project is clear about it, takes the minimum necessary data, and anonymizes it, make a clear and reasonable retention policy, then I am all for it.