This is my first reply to you, so how can I argue against your point again? Also it seems I can count myself lucky to work under a chief technology officer that actually thinks about technology and also understands actual benefits, not the ones just looking at the gardner quadrant of "who paid the most for pr". Besides that:

How vmware is a safe choice is beyond me, their proprietary so one is mostly locked in and at their bidding, their standard support reply is to install from scratch as otherwise the won't look at the setup. If you don't look at the technology POV (in addition to others) the choices probably won't be the best.

Notice how on Proxmox.com there's a testimonial page that links to enterprise and gov't customers, how's that different "Enterprise Marketing"?

Proxmox also has reseller partner all over the world: https://proxmox.com/en/partners/reseller

So we got enterprise support, world wide enterprise reseller network, enterprise features available for all, with or without support, not sure how much more enterprise vibes one can get..

vmware isn't really moving forwards since a while, the acquisition by broadcom won't help that either IMO, but sure they're currently still able to pay "bribe" some CTOs or sales people lunch, so they got that edge going for them, won't be enough to stay the #1 in the long run though.