Optane is great for small random writes because it can be overwritten directly, without the slow erase that NAND needs between writing to the same page, and the longevity is fantastic. Still, there are different degrees of random IO, and really a decent NAND SSD will handle most of them (and random reads are pretty fast for any enterprise NVMe drive,) especially if you get them oversized so they have plenty of spare blocks to erase and prepare for new writes.
In my thinking a VM generally doesn't do that many random writes, because Linux and BSD tend to be pretty optimized away from useless writes, and many write workloads are sequential. So you're really looking at a specific application like a high-throughput database in a VM that might benefit from Optane storage, and most of those can still be handled just fine by a write-optimized NAND drive, at a much lower price.
That said I have like 5 Optane drives in use for no good reason at all and I won't be giving them up ever.
In my thinking a VM generally doesn't do that many random writes, because Linux and BSD tend to be pretty optimized away from useless writes, and many write workloads are sequential. So you're really looking at a specific application like a high-throughput database in a VM that might benefit from Optane storage, and most of those can still be handled just fine by a write-optimized NAND drive, at a much lower price.
That said I have like 5 Optane drives in use for no good reason at all and I won't be giving them up ever.