Objectively there should be no difference between a honeypot VM and an actual "productive" VM. I acknowledge that it is much harder to setup, maintain and super

Objectively there should be no difference between a honeypot VM and an actual "productive" VM. I acknowledge that it is much harder to setup, maintain and supervise a network of honeypots VMs instead of a dedicated isolated honeypot server process which just simulates a system. However, as mentioned in other comments here, there is no gain of knowledge if you don't simulate a whole system but only parts of it.