Well, it's seems you're half right, vmware seems to have implemented some support for it. But limited to U.2 drives on a hotplug back plane??? I'm still fuzzy about it all to be honest. If you ask me, Intel had no business trying to do RAID again. They've been trying to put their foot into raid for years and have failed miserably, and now they've gone and moved it onto the processor and practically force you to either get intel SSDs or you just can't get the performance of NVMe SSDs direct attached to X16 pci lanes. That is total BS!
As far as "fake" raid, to be honest, I hate software raid controllers too, but now with these drives being so fast, you can't throw needing cache out the window and unless you get a dedicated xeon processor attached a controller, you're not going to do much better than using the processor. Basically, there's hardly any need for a hardware controller anymore and so far, all attempts to do so have resulted in reduced performance over VROC. I cringe at the thought of using intel's software, but I'm not seeing very many other options. They only other card I've seen that even remotely addresses the issue is HighPoint's NVMe Raid cards but even that is still lagging on the PCIe 3.0 support and PCIe 4.0 is here and it's FAST!
Intel is making things difficult on purpose I swear.