I toyed around with this a bit, and it feels like it has significant merit. User separation is about the only security boundary built into Linux from the beginning. I was not totally happy with the workflow I adopted, but it is probably going to be less burdensome than the VM approach.
With Fast User Switching on macOS it's pretty convenient too. The difficulty is remembering to switch user when changing contexts. I tried to set a different wallpaper/icon for each user to make it more obvious which user I'm on, but macOS just resets them all to be the same.
