Sure. But the title and article are about a "power-efficient VM host", not a powerful general-purpose repairable desktop. This is probably not the best (or worst) way to host a VM using minimal power.

You didn't suggest a better way (for at home). I explained why. VM hosts need processing power, good thermals, and reparability.

I thought I suggested many? I think it depends on what you're using the VM for. A used laptop or Mac Mini can easily host a dev environment. A hosted cloud CI/CD pipeline is better (power-wise) for compiles. A simple shell environment can be on anything. NAS etc can run on Raspberrys or routers.

On the other hand, if you're doing constant 24/7 GPU-intensive training, this thing is going to get loud, hot, and power-hungry, and it will be difficult to find GPUs to fit in there. If you're gaming, GeForce Now is going to be more power-efficient (datacenter cards with shared tenancy) than having your own on hot-standby all the time but most idling.

Maybe there is some in-between use case that really calls for a local desktop CPU? But usually I think using a recent laptop CPU would provide sufficient performance with a much lower power consumption.

Repairability was not a concern discussed in the article, but yes, it's a good thing to keep in mind if you're DIYing it. I was more concerned about the power usage scenarios.

It may be different for Intel, but at least this AMD CPU (actually an APU) is pretty much identical to the equivalent laptop chip, when you restrict power to it (which can be done in UEFI on my older deskmini). And again I'll point out the improved thermals of asrock's deskmini case vs a typical laptop, and now that I have the chance the lower cost!