>>datafl+(OP)
No it is not. The “first instruction in the BIOS” is 16 bit mode code when dealing with an x86 VM.
A virtual environment doesn’t even really need any BIOS or anything like that.
You can feel free to test with qemu direct kernel booting to see this skips a lot of delay without even having to use a specialized hypervisor like firecracker
>>datafl+(OP)
A bare VM may not have a BIOS, it's just partitioning supported by the host CPU and OS. The emulation of the legacy PC hardware stack for conventional OS compatibility is a separate thing. If the guest OS is custom-designed to launch in a bare VM with known topology it can boot very, very fast.