been thinking lately about turning my laptop into a hackintosh (for iOS dev obvs.)
any advice?
any reasons why I should opt for a vm?

If you want to play around with IOS either works. VM has bonus snapshots though.

If you want to realistically use it for any development, buy a MBPro that's broken or older off eBay.

If you go the VM route: I highly recommend not doing this. You will spend more time fixing OS related issues than working on your project (Every macOS version has its own weird bugs, newer versions have more bugs). I recommend buying an old Mac mini. Way more affordable than any Apple product.

Tried this a long time ago. Unless things have dramatically improved my advice is: don't.

Like the others said, get an old Mac that's just good enough to build stuff. Hackintosh is usually not worth the pain if you want to actually do stuff on it.