With all due respect, I'm fairly sure that anyone using "VM" the same way as you do here really think of it as a container or what.

It's a runtime, and go also has a similar, fairly fat runtime. It's just burnt into the binary instead of being shipped separately. (Hell, even Rust has a runtime, it's just very very lean compared to languages featuring a full GC like go and java)

You cant seriously compare JVM to the Go runtime. The JVM is on another level in size, complexity and bulkiness and size for a "compiled binary".

The Go runtime is mostly just for goroutines and other runtime stuff, like relection etc.

A go hello world binary is around 1mb, while the java one is (with a jre) up and around 50mb.