Every member will have it's own opinion regarding this matter. Personally I have been using the VM approach for so many years mostly due to the fact that I have 16c/32t CPUs. It will be "stupid" for baremetal to use so many cores unless you want to use Synology's Virtual Machine Manager which again I believe Proxmox is a better software for this job. Therefore I am using Proxmox 8 for my Synology NAS I just need only 4 vcores and I can use the rest of the cores for other type of VMs.
With VM in the past you had so much flexibility especially when it came to drivers but I believe now the community has grown so much and due to the effort of many people here they made available so many drivers for so many hardware therefore it does not matter.
Regarding the USB stick, all I can say, even Unraid is still using USB to boot the OS into the memory. It's not that bad...