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I run Parallels on a 2015 MacBook Pro and it works well for my purposes, primarily to let me use peripherals which are not supported by current drivers or application software ( ScanSoft / Toshiba scanners ) ; software which only works on older or newer MacOS levels ( TurboTax ); and security / experimental sandboxes.

As for the specific statement about running MFS, just for S&G I put Microsoft XP Pro on my Macbook and ran Microsoft Combat flight simulator with an old USB joystick. Combat Flight Simulation runs as fast as it ever did, works the same as far as I can tell / remember. And still running everything else.

What I dont like is MacOS insists on using up your user partition with swap and icloud cache. So I no longer feel,Macs “just work”, but they are still preferable to Linux and Windows, for most things, to me. But Parallels is pretty good. And MacOS is pretty good too, being a flavor of Unix with a gui on top if you need that sort of thing beyond Xwindows.

In reply to a comment about paying for Windows licenses, Parallels’ company must have made a deal with Microsoft, there is no charge to create a VM of several Microsoft levels and canned Linux distros are available too. ( Perhaps not for commercial use, checknfor your use case).

For those folks that say M1 emulation will never be able to run the x86 ISA at comparable speed, actually eventually that is possible and I might make the bet that will in a few years. Server processor vendors dont just satisfy themselves with running lots of lines of code to emulate an instruction. They start off doing that, profile as it runs, do a flow analysis, and swap in native instructions replacing branch displacements, etc. It helps them compete and replace the competitive ISA. They would share emulator IP to take hw market share. And the ARM processors have more IPS and definitely more threads, to bring to bear to execute the workload. 7-10 years ago IBM had software that did it well enough to let their cloud hardware servers host x86 VMs. IOW you are paying for an intel VM from a cloud server provider but it really isnt running on intel hardware, the hypervisor could provision IBM POWER arch hosts, Intel, or probably ARM.

Parallels is easier to use than VMWare if you are on a mac, but does not easily make portable VM snapshots etc, and it costs over $Biden 100 / year per physical Mac you host it on.