OP here: Keeps me corporate-friendly, mostly. Half my life is lived in the terminal and the other half is lived in the Microsoft Office suite, and the second half is what really pays the bills for now. C'est la vie.
b) To get banned for running the games in a Windows VM
Work is a Microsoft place, but honestly the web version of Outlook works great under Linux. Teams is usable. (My Linux friends complain that it sucks, but what they don't know is that it also sucks on Windows!)
I do the macOS/Linux VM combo. It's mostly that macOS is good for standard use. The hardware is nice, the apps are useful, etc. My VM is for development purpose. It's Debian and I3. I can have a VM for each project and I can suspend them when switching. Due to complexity of software projects and tooling conflicts, it's better to keep each project in its own space. I'd do the same if I was on Linux Desktop.