EOL means that official support ends for a certain back version. There is never EOL for the latest version. Since 17.x is the latest, EOL is not a relevant thought. There are probably no EOL's for back versions either, because there is no Official Support for a Free version.
De-facto-EOL comes from the discontinuing of the underlaying OS support. You can still use those old versions (providing that licensing still works, if any), if you use an old OS, but software company cannot possibly support them, because the underlaying OS is not supported. Thus there is no way to guarantee functionality nor security when running on an unsupported OS.
Now that VMware also runs on Linux, the de-facto EOL is very much OS dependent. For instance Ubuntu version EOLs are very much different to Windows 10 or Windows 11 (where in Windows there are tens of different version of them with different EOLs). Then, yet again, Apple versions are different.
If the question is about future - there is no way for a software company to know beyond the OS provider commitments. Windows commitments are a mess and thus unpredictable. But for instance Ubuntu Linux announces the EOL when a new version is released - for instance for LTS (Long Term Support) versions, EOL might be 5 or 6 years during which time you can Upgrade to a new LTS version automatically. So, if you want to have a predictable future of VMware use, you need to use Linux instead of Windows. However, you need to rely on community support since VMware software company does not provide proper instructions how to install VMware on Linux, not in all cases anyway. Luckily, Linux community has talented persons.
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