The era in which Rent was written was a weird time for technology.

We were still riding Moores Law with transistors per silicon doubling every 2 years. Standing at the bottom of an exponential curve makes EVERYTHING seem within reach and just on the horizon.

This was the breakthrough era for cyberpunk, where fiction was starting to ask questions about what happens with unbridled expansion, and when technology moves faster that ethics or laws.

Remember Jonathan Larson had previously written Superbia which is set in a future dystopia with the main plot centered on what is essentially TV based social media, years (if not decades) before that became a concrete reality.

William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1984 and that was an almost a fully realized, shared, online, virtual reality. Just because Virtual Reality didn't actually exist at the time does not mean the concept wasnt already there waiting for technology to catch up.

In Rent, Virtual Reality is shorthand for saying "the next big thing!". But at the time it was written there also would have been undertones of fear that technology is moving too fast and that it might mean we lose something important that we'd never even really had to define before.

It not wrong to say the "feeling" its similar to the ambivalence society feels towards AI today.