It actually looks like this works.
gdalbuildvrt -tr .1 .1 test.vrt "vrt://ZARR:/vsigs/store/group:/variable_1:1?a_ullr=-180,90,180,-90"
where I noticed dropping a_ullr results in a Warning 1: gdalbuildvrt does not support positive NS resolution. Skipping.
Then, I can open with
rioxarray.open_rasterio("test.vrt", chunks="auto")
This might do the trick! I’ll try on a large-ish dataset and check the data and report back.
It would be sick if the same thing worked for multidimensional vrt and we only need to make one “vrt” for the entire xarray dataset, but I dead end with rioxarray saying the file format is not supported.