[Software] Does virtualization make me a traitor
 

I've been using Linux in one vector or another since I was 12 or 13 years old if you do the math you'll figure of that that's' 23 plus years..

I've also used both VMWare Workstation and Sun(now Oracle) Virtual-box. I like the feeling of helping my distribution of choice however, I haven't got the resources both financially and space wise to have the bare metal.
So if I where to spin up a virtual machine that I could use to then use to say help the Debian developers test and prototype the next release od f Debian would I be considered a traitor?

I can guarantee you that a LOT of distribution testing is done on VMs.

Not really but there are a few limitations since there are a few things that really can not be fully test with a VB guest. Audio and video are still virtual devices where as a kvm qemu guest has pass through capability. You can not test secure boot but you can test the installers and applications and you can help with bugs.

Heck, I use VMs all the time.

It gives me a chance to explore stuff I otherwise would never get a chance to learn about.

In my job I have access to a few thousand virtual machines and they deploy them on almost every upgrade. Stacks of computers are compressed now on a redundant system. Easy to grab images and move them live. Really it's a great solution to many tasks. The single one that may not be is intensive use graphics maybe. Games, video processing and such. Everyday the integration with host gets closer and closer.

Most of the world's computing is now done "in the cloud," and that either means VMs or containers. There are very large and successful hosting enterprises which specialize in both.

In a sense, "time-sharing has finally grown up." :) We can now build computers with enormous capacity (and built-in support for virtualization), and we have finally hit upon robust strategies for "carving them up into byte-sized (sorry ...) pieces."

Every operating system these days knows when it is running in a VM and can adapt itself accordingly. Today, basically, "everything works as expected."