Have you tried a later release such as the 20.04 LTS release?
Ubuntu doesn't make things easy - it's been difficult to find a 18.04 release for arm64 architectures so I can see if I get the same behavior.
I was able to find that iso and got the same issue as you. Something about that kernel and installer just doesn't want to see the CD/DVD device.
The installer has a kernel of 4.x - that's way older than the 5.13 minimum that's recommended by VMware in the TP guide - if you want open-vm-tools to work, that is (which you do)...
The live installer for 20.04 LTS seems to work fine...Although it too is on an older kernel (5.4) release.