I don't work in firmware at all, but I'm working next to a team now migrating an application from VMs to K8S, and they refer to the VMs as "bare metal" which I find slightly cringeworthy - but hey, whatever language works to communicate an idea.
I'm not sure I've ever heard bare metal used to refer to virtualized instances. (There were debates around Type 1 and Type 2 (hosted) hypervisors at one point but haven't heard that come up in years.
