Oh, it's definitely not a 100% substitute for the Real Thing, to be sure! I aim beginners toward VCV when it's clear that someone's in a position where they have ZERO idea about modular synthesis, with the intent that once you know what should be in a proper modular, you should THEN start building. A few stick with VCV, and I'll also note that VCV + its VST extension does make for a good sequencing/clocking environment, but in the end, VCV is only a "model" of something that works so much better in actual hardware.
I do have it, but I still find it to be somewhat untrustworthy when larger setups are in use, especially if there's a lot in the audio paths. Those audio modules are often "bad actors" as far as CPU load is concerned. And that makes perfect sense; it's harder to accurately emulate the behavior of an analog audio device than it is to be "inaccurate" and fudge the results. It's very much related to the fact that digital computers don't like chaotic systems...and as far as gobs of waveforms and such being generated and modified in a hardware modular patch, you ARE working with a system that has some inherent chaos, and the various flavors of "chaos" actually factor into what things sound like.