This is what I did, and it did its goal in making me comfortable using Linux. However, like what others suggest, live USB is probably much more easier honestly.

I prefer to boot a live USB first to get a better feel

As others have said - Live USB.

Set up a USB stick with Ventoy and you can throw a bunch of distros on there so you can trial all of them without needing to flash a new USB.

Just put the ISOs on the Ventoy flash drive and boot into Ventoy.

My preference is „bare metal” approach, then I really know if everything is working as it should, so I had a separate drive for Linux installation at the beginning and got to my other drives by just mounting them as NTFS.

But, finally I am at the point of no return for some time now, the old Windows drive is not even inside of my PC and the other drives are ext4 already.

For a quick check Live CDs/USBs are totally fine but not fully representative.

It's a good way to try it out. You can also use a live usb or cd where you can boot Linux into memory and it won't affect your current installation.

That or live cd (well, most likely live usb nowadays)

Live USB boot IMO, you remove the virtualization performance overhead.

Probably, but there’s also DistroSea

VMWare Workstation is free now.

I use VBox to run my PiHole for now and have used it to play with a couple distros side by side. I also have a sup'd up tower built from spare parts from work, so resources aren't a constraint.