I’m not sure there is a consensu here, it’s a trade off in many dimensions: security, simplicity, performance, independence, ease of management etc.

Bare metal gives you best performance, good simplicity since there are the least moving parts and the least amount of code deployed. It is fairly easy to manage if you know your distro and service well. You might run into trouble if you want to run non packaged software and compile things on your own.

Containers are pretty efficient and simple to use because a lot of software comes pre-packaged (usually including a basic OS, w/o kernel). They are meant to only have one service per container, which can lead to quite some complexity in inter-connecting them. Security wise, they are less well isolated than VMs between each other and to the host. Operating on their persisted state can be very easy and lightweight. One drawback is that people often don’t understand whats happening inside (cf. Reproducibility). The saying goes: As with smoothies, you immeadiately know if you like it (a container) but you don’t know what’s inside.

VMs are slightly less efficient but have a larger management overhead, ie. You need to configure and upgrade each OS (users, firewall rules etc) on its own, on the other hand you gain flexibility by being able to install different distros or having different versions around. You can also more easily manage the state of the machines (backups, snapshots etc). Security wise, VMs are pretty well isolated from each others and the hypervisor, often the configuration of the machines is the weak point (firewall, sshd or other services).