Actually, perhaps this doesn't address all your points, but I share the sentiment about VM snapshots "feeling" quite similar, in fact I experience it every day

Actually, perhaps this doesn't address all your points, but I share the sentiment about VM snapshots "feeling" quite similar, in fact I experience it every day as I run ZFS as a root filesystem within VMware. The real gain for me is that all of these tools are in-band with my working OS. If I were provided a VM(s) on AWS or some SAN by my employer, that could in theory give us a mutual benefit. Ops could avoid giving me access via IAM or whatever and expanding beyond some set limit, but allow me to perform almost identictal "ops like" tasks using ZFS (which I also find to be fairly user friendly). Incidentally, I'm also a fan of nested virtualization and using git on top of ZFS... I believe all of these tools complement each other nicely as opposed to being mere repetitions.