Regular VMs aren’t emulation. They use various hardware and software features to isolate themselves from the host OS, allowing them to run a completely different guest OS, but they’re not emulating the OS, they’re actually running the code on your CPU as-is. The only time that involves emulation is if you want to run a VM for a different CPU architecture than the host. Then you need a CPU emulator.
Regular VMs aren’t emulation. They use various hardware and software features to isolate themselves from the host OS, allowing them to run a completely different guest OS, but they’re not emulating the OS, they’re actually running the code on your CPU as-is. The only time that involves emulation is if you want to run a VM for a different CPU architecture than the host. Then you need a CPU emulator.