Dave,

I trust your debugging skills. But at least in my case - and I think Allessandro's - this happens when performing an orderly shutdown from within macOS. No difference between shutdown / startup or reboot via the Apple menu. But the behaviour is consistent with your findings ie when booting, macOS acts AS IF it was a forced power-down of the virtual hardware. This was working in 11.0.1 and 10.15.7 but broke in 11.1. So the interaction between macOS 11.1 and VMware in the final stage of the shutdown process isn't working as expected ie macOS fails to record this (in the virtual nvram, filesystem metadata, ?) as a clean shutdown. As if VMware were to prematurely power down the VM.

Roland