The README states these platches only apply to the vanilla versions of the kernel.
That's not what it says. The README says the patches are tested against vanilla kernels (I can't really be expected test build against all distribution kernels). It says nothing about them not applying to any other kernel. There may be problems with distribution kernel backporting changes from new kernels to old ones as some of the changes are not easy to detect properly so that I have to resort to checking kernel versions. But with experimental 5.0-rc1 packages, I wouldn't really expect problems.
And, please, stop blaming Linus for your problems. Only one of the three changes breaking the build against 5.0-rc1 comes from him (and no, switching to new "major version" has nothing to do with it). The kernel does not promise internal API stability (it never did) and everyone who decides to maintain an out-of-tree module has to expect incompatible changes and has to adapt their module from time to time. It's up to them how quickly they do so. VMware is known to be one of the slower ones (being two versions behind is quite common) which is why my repository exists. (What makes me really sad is rather the growing list of build warnings VMware chose to ignore.)
