They work just fine, the product is one of many that's used by shops now. GCP even recently launched a LA region and had an entire day dedicated to the local VFX shops. Nothing stops you from just running a bunch of VMs which many do and they have rolled out the Filestore NFS to make shared disks easier too.
Is that a recent shift? I remember talking to someone from a VFX shop a few years ago, and they made it sound like back then anything cloud was a no-go due to their customers requiring material to stay in-house for fear of leaks.
Yes, smaller studios were early but now the majors like Sony Imageworks are all in. The cloud is a great fit for most of their rendering jobs and security is no different (if not better handled by the cloud).
Recent enough - at a Google event earlier in 2018 it was mentioned that GCP was now compliant with most (if not all) of the major studios’ security requirements.
