Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it.
As far as I know, Windows 7 can be run on Skylake systems without any hassle. With some headaches, this is also true for Kaby Lake and a few Coffee Lake systems. Some manufacturers have provided Windows 7 drivers for a few of 300 series motherboards, e.g., ASUS B365. So I think Coffee Lake is the last generation that potentially but not officially, supports Windows 7. However, it needs some tricks to be up and running.
The problem with a virtual machine is that it doesn't have direct access to real drivers (to the best of my knowledge). It uses virtual drivers provided by VMware itself or other VM applications. I don't want to use virtualization either unless there is some workaround to take advantage of native drivers.
I'd be happy to be corrected.