I think we do not loose anything if we also switch on the VM to use the SimpleStateManager as the default one, since in this case the VM is not meant to operate on some state-containing state manager anyhow. This will have a substantial effect on the bundle size for the default VM initalization.
This likely needs some small adjustments like going from throwing for the get/has/setStateRoot methods for the simple state manager to fake ones like (I think?) being done for the RPC state manager, also a bit related is #3546 in this context.