I've looked into replacing Lima with Apple Containers for https://runmachine.dev.
However, unlike Lima, an Apple Container is not a full VM, so you cannot SSH to it, or forward SSH-agent signatures into a machine.
So it's more of a devcontainer story, which is also a great use case. Nice to see Apple creating tooling around their VZ framework.
Edit: referential clarity.
Might consider https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
It's a full vm