All good questions

First let me clear up a typo from the message you replied to - I meant to say Directory Utility instead of Director Utility. Anyways, I only have one account on my Mac, which is my administrator account, and I've always installed and ran VMware Fusion (12, 13, and now the tech preview) from this same account. When Fusion prompts me for my password while opening, I enter my account's password and this seems to satisfy it.

I didn't enable the root account until like a day or two after trying to start a VM and getting the error. I first discovered the sudo trick but then had a problem with things like keyboard inputs because required permissions were missing, and this was when I went down the rabbit hole of using the root account.

Finally, I was able to replicate this issue three times in different configurations, the first being a separate volume on my current Mac that had a fresh copy of Sonoma Beta installed, the second being another distinct volume on my main Mac that had Ventura installed (where everything worked fine) and then got upgraded to Sonoma Beta (where this issue occurred), and then another distinct volume, this time on my work Mac (a 2021 14-inch Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pro), with a fresh copy of Sonoma Beta installed where things once again broke with the same issue occurring there as well. I didn't enable the root account on any of these three separate configurations.