Because there's no business potential.

20 years ago anyone and everyone had datacenters full of VMware. Now most of it is stuff that a company hasn't bothered to move to cloud yet. There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things. Like stuff that absolutely needs to be self hosted for privacy or security. The time of VMware being the default is long gone.

Moving from a mainstream to a niche product means a market that's shrinking. No growth potential. No potential for new competitors to start up. Proxmox is good but it's not exactly enterprise.

This is why Broadcom bought it and sucks the most value out of it before it completely disappears.

> There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things.

That just isn't true. The reality is that being in the cloud is not beneficial for most businesses. They do it because it's trendy, not because it's the best solution. In recent years we've seen more and more recognition of that fact, and it has driven people to host stuff on prem.