It's funny, so does Bitcoin, Adobe Reader, a lot of things.

Maybe we need to rewrite that old law:

All programs expand until they contain a virtual machine. Those that cannot do so are replaced by ones that can.

What does Bitcoin do with virtual machine?

(If you don't take "running the bitcoin script" as "virtual machine".... then yes, it is technically a virtual machine, but very Turing incomplete.)

Yes, I meant the script. Not turing complete, sure, but still quite flexible.

Greenspun's Rule basically covers that. Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Although nowadays the art of programming is maturing enough that the inner platform sometimes is deliberately designed and well specified.

Yeah would it be possible to have a .rar containing some VM instructions (maybe pulling data from a payload within the archive) that would automatically execute upon unzipping?

Yes. That's exactly what unzipping (or, well, unrarring) does.