If your VMs consume CPU, as opposed to mostly waiting, many cores with low power consumption are beneficial.

If all the VMs do is waiting for a network packet 99.9% of time, then not so much.

It's not anything super resource intensive beyond the inherent need for the resources of the VM + host. I just got sick of dealing with some of macOS's idiosynchacies in it's Very Special Epiosde of BSD that is their CLI interface, so I spin up an Xbuntu or Debian image when I have a project. (That + snapshots makes it a lot less painful to try interesting things)