Kubernetes might have success, but AFAICS Kubernetes also sort of involves a new way of architecting applications (cloud native applications, 12-factor apps, microservices, etc.; whatever the buzzword du jour is). The idea with vmware was always to virtualize all those zillions of more or less idling physical servers, and get some snazzy management GUI to handle them all etc. etc.
But kuvevirt with Kubernetes does much of the same, especially for companies that are--or know they will--move to containerized workloads anyway.
the vmware implosion + kubevirt gaining maturity is what will hyper-accelerate this.
nonetheless, it's a bit nuts that a vsphere alternative doesn't really exist for kubernetes. openshift, harvester and foss projects like portainer are close but not really the same thing. vsphere made it stupid easy to orchestrate vms at any scale with any level of experience. your cat could deploy a simple two-node vDC, and you could theoretically click your way through doing very very complicated things with your cluster (though you probably should).
esxi was silly easy to install most of the time also. provisioning kubernetes is finally (as of maybe three years ago?) pretty easy to do, but day two ops are still very command line. great for nerds like you and me; not good for former VIadmins who were suddenly thrown into the k8siverse.
this is even worse on the networking front. anyone who's messed with cilium or calico vs administrating NSX will know what i'm talking about. you can click your way through setting up a whole logical enterprise-grade networking fabric with vSANs, BGP, stateful firewall, the whole nine, all with near-linespeed performance throughout your vDC. cilium and calico, on the other hand, are powerful but have (to my knowledge) no real GUI equivalents.
storage is even worse. there's no vSAN frontend equivalent in the k8s landscape afaik.
orgs now are kind-of scrambling for alternatives. great for nutanix. better for the CSPs. also great for red hat (my employer) since we have openshift virt, which is based on kubevirt but is much easier to use and works nicely with the rest of the ecosystem.