To be fair with you, QEMU introduced plenty of confusion with that microvm machine type, and people use the term to talk about many different things at once, some use the term for minimalist VMs like Firecracker does, some use it for wrapped containers like Kata containers (which can use Firecracker), and I’m skipping a few. What we really want is something that boots faster and with a smaller footprint, which, with equivalent kernel and resources, almost always amounts to removing the firmware and bootloader altogether.