The first thing I do on a new machine is clone my dotfiles from Github. It's fast enough for an action that increases my productivity exponentially and I'll end up saving back that time it took to clone very quickly. I don't switch machines that often anyway.
It’s very little to cp .vimrc. I do a lot more, have dotfiles git repo scripted to self install.
But yes transient vms are problem. But I’m willing to suffer a little on them to have 20x more enjoyable and productive were I do 90% of my writing.