I've been at F1000 with ESXi clusters, they had 20 racks full of blades/switches/SANs that made up 4000 core cluster. They will ride or die ESXi no matter how hard VMware screws them over.
But it will be a long process and a lot of money will be made by vmware and partners even as the market wound down and move to whatever it is that going to replace it(im willing to bet it wont be kubenetes as we know it today).
Problem with creating competitive offering is F1000 are not going to take risk on you. Last thing CIO wants to remember for is someone who greenlit moving core infrastructure to product that went under. They also need to provide decent support so startup today has about 15 years before they even think of breaking into this market.
So it's got to be a major player like Microsoft who seems to not care about this market because Azure. Nutanix is there but they are all in hyperconverged meaning traditional compute/storage separated hardware would have to be thrown out. Red Hat exited in 2020. So I don't see a competitor on the horizon.
Unless broadcom has made the CIO (or CFO...) mad, then it is all hands on deck to replace them.. I know one company (by personal conversation with insiders, but I don't think they want to be named) replacing otherwise good tools because broadcom now owns them and the license fees are too high