I looked into this when I got an M1 chipped Mac. I had some x86_64 Linux VMs I thought I'd still want around and used to use in Parallels. In one case a basic command line only CentOS 7 VM. The good news is that after a bit of messing with the various options etc I did get it to work. The bad news is that it was somewhat on the slow side.
Whilst it was an interesting little technical problem to find a solution to, it's not something I felt the need to continue with. So I bit the bullet and decided not to bother about older OS that was x86_64 only and just used some later aarch64 varients (if available) via Parallels instead. Given that I'm an old git now and I'm a Linux sys admin and spend all day messing with boxen, when I get home I want something that not only "just works" but also doesn't tempt me to try and "fix/tweak" something. As that usually ends up with said something not working or going down some sort of rabbit-hole.