The difference is that the vast majority of people are deploying to the cloud so they are already deploying to a hypervisor. Every single cloud is built on top

The difference is that the vast majority of people are deploying to the cloud so they are already deploying to a hypervisor. Every single cloud is built on top of virtualization. AWS used to use Xen, now they use KVM. Google Cloud is entirely built on KVM. Azure uses Hyper-V. The cloud is just an API for virtualization. Instead of AWS (hypervisor) => linux => k8s => containers unikernels advocate for AWS (hypervisor) => unikernel and that makes them run much faster in general (we've clocked upwards of 300% req/sec for go/rust webservers on AWS for instance) and a lot safer.