Companies shouldn't be going all in on one piece of software anyways. Mine is going to all Azure, and I can see the pain train coming from miles away when they decide to jack up pricing or tank service. Kind of surprised to see so many companies putting all their eggs into one basket.

Years ago, I had a job where we were moving from Citrix to esxi. I was so excited because I had bought into the hype and Citrix had annoyed me to no end. 4 months into the migration project, we hit a major roadblock. Open a ticket - no response. Reach out to our contact for escalation after a week - no response. Our director reached out to the high level person on the VMware side of the deal - no response.

At least with Citrix we usually got a response within 24 hours with information or being told they were escalating. We stuck with Citrix because our director at least didn't fall into the sunk cost fallacy.

Disagree on vCenter/ESXi. Having a competent design, build, and initial deployment are usually the success factors. I've had ESXi hosts and vCenter that only need to go offline for mandatory security patching, and even then, it's easily covered by vMotion.

Agree that VMware Workstation is awful.

Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin

It's weird how I've worked in Large-scale Enterprise shops for more than the last decade, and ESX since about 4 has required absolutely no break-fix other than patching and whatever the underlying hardware needed. We're talking thousands of VMs, and flawless metro-vmotion of hundreds of hot-and-running streaming VMs at times, and over years. To see what you've written, it could be a very different product from the one I've used, as I've seen none of what you mention.

I hope you can see the same reliability one day, from the product where you've migrated.