Curious, I ditched our last VMWare servers ~a decade ago for KVM (via ganeti) for 100-200VMs running our dev, stg, and production loads, and it's been super reliable.
It's not curious at all; your workload was probably easy. The same program can crash constantly on one piece of _correct_ hardware, while working fine on a different piece of hardware.
I was torturing the hardware and KVM wasn't designed to do that, until about two years ago.
