Because unless your entire environment set up procedure is reproducible from top to bottom, something can break along the way. Whereas if you are already shippi

Because unless your entire environment set up procedure is reproducible from top to bottom, something can break along the way. Whereas if you are already shipping a VM (or a container image, which on Linux is much lighter than a VM) you are really only relying on the VM runtime, everything else will work automatically if the VM runtime is working. It's only one thing that can break, only one thing you need to figure out how to fix in order to get the system working, instead of 1000 unknown and unknowable things. And if you're using some kind of hosted solution, you're literally paying for a working VM runtime.