The argument isn't "same instruction set". The argument is "same development & deployment environment", by the logic of which the Apple argument fails because not many people deploy to Apple servers.
So you run a Linux VM, just as lots of Mac-using developers do today. But the instruction set of the VM has to match the instruction set of the host, unless you’re in the mood for slow emulation.
> So you run a Linux VM, just as lots of Mac-using developers do today
I hear far more make do with just homebrew.
> unless you’re in the mood for slow emulation
I run an embedded OS (made for a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 board) on both Real Hardware and on my ThinkPad (via systemd-nspawn & qemu-arm). I found (and confirmed via benchmarks) the latter to be much faster than the former — across all three of compute, memory, and disk access.
