Is this true? I have honestly never worked in any company >50 people that didn't use VMs on owned hardware in some capacity, though usually not the main product.
IT departments typically love VMs (and vmware)- AD machines are most often hosted on VMs on VMWare.
Two of the companies I've worked for have run gigantic clusters and had >100 employees and didn't really use VMs. One of them used one to build some third party libs, but it was basically an implementation detail of one script. Everything on the servers was still bare metal. You already have user separations, permissions/privileges, etc. It's not clear what a VM adds other than as a hack to allowed installed packages to diverge which doesn't matter if you vendor them.
IT departments typically love VMs (and vmware)- AD machines are most often hosted on VMs on VMWare.