And stupid question #3: How are you shutting down your Windows VM?

I say that because there are no VMware tools to gracefully ask Windows to shut down in the Tech Preview release. Therefore you should shut the VM down from within the guest. Any other mechanism could be considered a crash - like pulling the plug on a physical machine.

I've just installed the Windows 11 22H2 Release Preview channel build 22621.317 and it got updated to 22621.382. I'll keep watch of it and see if anything funny starts to happen.