I ended up with using a minimal install of Debian as a base. I am now trying to find out if there is a way to make a base install of Debian that I just can replicate to save a little time 
Things to learn.
Also, I realized that if I rent some cloud instance from Linode, DigitalOcean etc. I am actually using a VM. And everyone runs Docker etc. on that, so I guess it is not a question of either or.
The few things I will start out with are actually distributed as Docker images. Seems some projects prefer this now.
One thing you could do in a video is to show how you change an existing VM. I am very used to do this for VMs in Virtualbox, but found it a little cumbersome in XCP-NG.