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Lots of reasons, but the general purpose (in this context) is to add another layer of obfuscation to a user's activity by utilizing an isolated environment separated from one's native operating system.

There are a lot of other uses for virtualization: software testing, replicating potentially malicious conditions in a sandboxed environment, and configuring installs for future deployment, to name a few.

Yes, there is a performance tradeoff, so particularly intensive tasks (like high-end gaming, for instance) are going to eat up a lot of extra resources than they otherwise would if running natively. Still, virtualization provides a lot more control to someone who wishes to experiment with different OSes without having to install them natively (as in, whatever automatically starts up when you physically turn on your computer)

using a VM would easily build a completely different profile for the web browser for a layman.

web browsers hold "fingerprints" like operating system, browser version, screen resolution, extensions. all this is used to identify you.

for example. i dont need google/amazon/MC/etc knowing what bank i use.

i use different browser/email combos for different tasks.
email1/brave : general use
email2/firefox: banking only
email3/chrome: shopping
etc

i know you were, i was just teasing back. i enjoyed playing the games with you also. :)