I actually had 4 vms on my working version of Fusion (Windows NT, Windows XP Pro, Windows 7 Ultimate, and Windows 10).  I think when I created the Win10 vm, I built it on the Win7 vm (when my machine crapped out and I tried to open the Win10 vm, it wants to know where the Win7 vm files were).

I went back to a few days before my machine crapped out and restored the Windows 10.vmwarevm from TimeMachine.  Inside the package is a file called Windows 7.vmdk (there were no other vmdk files in there.  All the other Virtual Machines either only had a single vmdk file or multiple vmdk files because I created the vms without a specified file allocation size).  I copied that file to a Windows laptop and using 7-Zip, I was able to open the file and found my files.

So, yes, 7-Zip will expand VMware *.vmdk files.  You just have to find the correct vmdk file to start with.

Since I can't run  Fusion on my M1 iMac any more, I really don't care about clobbering something.