Virtualization and Docket are orthogonal technologies. The reason you use docker, especially in dev, is to have the exact same system libraries, dependencies, and settings on each build. The reason you use virtualization is to access hardware and kernel features that are not present on your hardware or native OS.
If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in production, then ideally you should be using docker on your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS users, requires a Linux VM as well.
It seems that you're trying to "educate" me on how containers and virtualization work, when in fact I've been doing this for a while, on macOS, Linux and Windows (itself having its own Hyper-V pitfalls).
I know you mean well, though.
There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.
I'm sorry that I came up as patronizing, I was more so trying to explain my confusion and thought process rather than to teach you about virtualization and containers.
Specifically what confused me in your comment was that you were saying Docker on Mac was superseded by their new native virtualization, which just doesn't make sense to me, for the reasons I was bringing up. I still don't understand what you were trying to say; replacing docker with podman or containerd or something else still doesn't have anything to do with virtualization or Rosetta, or at least I don't see the connection.
I should also say that I don't think anyone really means specifically docker when they talk about it, they probably mean containerization + image repos in general.
If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in production, then ideally you should be using docker on your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS users, requires a Linux VM as well.