I suspect they knew (and to be fair, probably correct) that a decent number of small businesses (and maybe even larger ones) were using ESXi and they just decided to shut that down in a push to get more licenses.

If my theory is correct, in about two years (if they haven't killed it entirely by the) they'll introduce a "free for homelab use" variant - maybe.

But Workstation and Fusion were more used by personal people and as a support tool FOR professionals, so they needed to keep those going, but charging $79 for it just wasn't worth the hassle. Notice they're not even selling ANY licenses directly anymore; you have to go through someone else. VMWare sold directly.

What @bombcar said.

"Free" ESXi is.. well, free. They are converting enterprises to enterprise customers. Some bloke with WKS is not an enterprise customer.

You could use Workstation Pro to directly assess VMs running on an ESXi server, so maybe the idea is to make company's more dependent upon the central infrastructure where they can squeeze.

You could actually cajole the free player to do this with ESXi but it was definitely not license kosher.