I can't speak to Linode but in my experience the Digital Ocean VM performance is quite bad compared to bare metal offerings like Hetzner, OVH, etc. It's basically comparable to AWS, only a bit cheaper.
It's essentially the same product, but you do get lower disk latency. Best performance is always going to be a dedicated server which in the US seem to start around $80-100/month (just checking on serversearcher.com), DO and so on do provide a "dedicated cpu" product if that's too much.
They still use VMs, but as far as I know they have simple reserved instances, not “cloud”-like weather?
Is the performance better and more predictable on large VPSes?
(edit: I guess a big difference is that VPS can have local NVMe that is persistent, whrereas EC2 local disk is ephemeral? )