You can buy a second hand machine ready for ESXi for 200 - 300 bugs on Ebay. The license for ESXi is free.
If you use eagerzeroed thick vmdks exclusively on ESXi your VMs will be long term stable.
The really deciding question here is: do you need to run Win10 or Win11 VMs ?
If not - go for ESXi - if possible with 5.5 or 6.7u3 - both are no longer supported or will drop out of support soon.
But for a standalone ESXi free version there will be no matter which version you use.

Please tell us about the guestOS versions you must use - that is the deciding factor.

Ulli