With the new commit to poky: "python: remove Python 2 and all supporting classes" the meta-virtualization layer fails to parse. This should not be removed until the other meta- layers in yocto work with python 3.
This has been signalled as happening for some time, and until the presumably unmaintained software that *still* uses Python 2 is ported adding meta-python2 as a layer dependency is a simple fix. Not a bug.
Thank you for the explanation.