iPhone texting on Windows via a macOS VM on Linux (Phew)

Pretty much.

I mean, I don’t have a good answer to that for almost anything I do on a computer. :p

I might give up or get distracted early on, though! Esp. because I don’t have a NUC/spare PC right now, so would have to be doing the harder VM route.

The VM route is actually pretty easy; MacOS is simple to run in a VM on Linux, no need to worry about hardware incompatibilities and drivers etc. This is the modern way to hackintosh, nobody is installing on bare metal anymore. You run in a VM and passthrough your GPU. Runs great and no worries about upgrades as you can just take a snapshot.