I used to do all my development in VMs but found they were too heavy-weight, too slow and too difficult to keep "clean". Docker doesn't give you the same isolation at the resource level, which is a major benefit of VMs, but I also found this was more of a hinderance than a help. For me sharing the artifacts of development or the dependencies (i.e. building Docker images or using containers for parts of the system not under development) is where the value is, vs a completely isolated, reproducable software/hardware environment. A baseline VM is still great for reproducing production issues, and avoids the "Works on my machine" badge.