Switching away today is too mind boggling to consider, but switching is purely a technical problem. We can put a price on the costs, and the time. VMWare was founded in 1998 - that means 27 year ago nobody was using it, and in turn we can say took you less than 27 years to get dependent on and - surely you can switch to something else in 27 years. More likely you can switch in 2 years - that is about what it took one company I know of.

Sure but old company cut Ops team to the bone, which is why I don’t work there anymore. So CTO is faced with, pay VMware or cut back on deployments so Ops team can have some breathing room to work on migration to whatever they pick.