That was certainly a reason, along with the fact that Tiny BASIC was free and offered enough to easily write simple programs.
Writing a good virtual machine is a really hard task. There have been a few and most of them are rather slow, because they resemble real machines or follow some pure model, which causes lots of overhead. One of the best VMs I have seen is
https://github.com/AcheronVM/acheronvm , targeting the 6502, but the design itself is inspiring. There is a nice presentation on Youtube. It is neither a virtual stack machine, nor a virtual register machine, but a great hybrid that avoids much addressing overhead, as stack VMs do, and offers the dataflow advantage of register VMs. A SC/MP port would probably be as slow as NIBL, but it might still be fun.
Michael