As Someone that runs Proxmox and ESXI.

That is hardly true.

The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.

Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.

Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.

Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.

Proxmox fall down on Enterprise tooling and integration with other software enterprises use to run the business

Things like Monitoring Platforms, Backup Solutions (veeam), Automation tool kits (powershell), etc.

I like Proxmox, I use it personally, but in its current form I do not see how any medium or large enterprise that has is management tooling around VMWare could just drop in proxmox.

not super critical but is there a terraform provider for proxmox? I looked at proxmox a while back when building my home server but went with esxi free because of the community provider - https://github.com/josenk/terraform-provider-esxi

I've used both, though not for anything especially complicated. Your guess about the polish level is correct; ESXi blows Proxmox out of the water interface-wise, especially for some specific tasks like configuring networks or managing PCI passthrough devices. As far as "more limited" goes, I can't say I noticed much of a feature discrepancy, although being open and just sitting atop KVM, Proxmox doesn't have any of the artificial limitations imposed by VMware (like a cap on number of vCPUs in the free version, eugh).

One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely to run on crap-tier commodity hardware, whereas VMware has all the usual enterprise-level support commitments and so you're very much on your own if you try to force it to run on hardware that isn't on their official compatibility list.

I use Proxmox and can do everything OP just described. I would assume the esxi is more polished, but I don't spend a heck of a lot of time on my hypervisor; mostly on what it's hypervising.