If you do bare metal as not being under a VM it fits. OCI on linux is cgroup so that counts as not a VM I'd say. Or at least it's a layer closer to the metal than a typical VM running OCI images.

I a Java app running on Linux bare metal?

You can run an OCI container on bare metal though. It doesn't stop being run on bare metal just because you're running in kernel namespaces, aka docker container

Lots of people were advocating for running their k8s on bare metal servers to maximize the performance of their containers

Now wherever that's applied to your conversation... I've no clue, too little context ( ｡ ŏ ﹏ ŏ )

My basement server really confused by all this...