Doesn't sound too unreasonable to me...
If you prefer to run without support, you can of course still do that. But don't install newer patches then.
My minor personal grief is that I've had perpetual licenses for vsphere 6. In the transition to broadcom account, those have completely and utterly disappeared - if you read the details of 3rd level FAQ, by design. Ah well!
The real tragedy to me is the loss of access for non massive customers. Vmware was smart to build a slope of adoption, from individual techies with curiosity and home labs, to small shops with simple needs, all the way through massive governmental or multinational behemoths. That ramp-up is being dismantled. They can ride current crop of enterprise customers for a long time -- but where is next batch going to come from? Which techies in which company in 10 years,who don't already have pervasive vmware footprint, will even begin to consider it?
Quite the opposite, actually - actively try to not fall into that trap.
"perpetual" basically meant that your license doesn't suddenly expire, not that you get free lifetime patches/updates
It just meant that the license itself doesn't suddenly expire (and render your VMware environment useless/non-working). It didn't mean that you get lifetime free updates. That was always tied to a support contract.