Not if the VM host is on Apple-branded HW.

Also, you'd have to get caught. It's not customer-facing.

"You'd have to get caught" isn't a way to do business. Plus it won't fly for those of us who work in giant megacorps with license audits.

And if your company has dreams of becoming a larger successful company, you are going to have to pull it out anyway. Its cheaper in the long run just to buy a Mac Mini or an older MacBook. I'd even argue its cheaper time-wise just to get the hardware instead of dealing with an unstable build server if you go the hackintosh route.

If you're running xcode CI at a giant megacorp, you might want to rethink your life decisions.

Thats unfair to say. Release Engineering is super critical to running great software companies and is a strict technical discipline of its own.

Why doesn't Apple make it possible to use its development environment (required for developing products to run on its hardware) in a VM? This seems like a user-unfriendly decision.

Its business model is making a sweet profit on premium hardware.