You answered my question and I agree that talking about pre and post APFS in the same sentence is a true challenge. Even more mind bending to me are the Recovery and Preboot partition volumes. But apparently through the "magic" of virtualization anything is possible. I am going to have to spend more time wrapping my head around all of this.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein