No sooner do I post the above than I see that 7.0 U3f is now released... and it includes this fix!!! I will be patching a few hosts today and will report results.
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-70u3f-release-notes.html
After the first upgrade or update of your system to ESXi 7.x, with each consecutive update, also called a patch, you might see a truncation in the path to the /productLocker directory on a datastore. For example, if your first patch on ESXi 7.x is from 7.0 Update 2 to 7.0 Update 3, the path to the /productLocker directory originally is similar to /vmfs/volumes/xxx/VMware-Tools/productLocker/. However, for each consecutive patch, for example from 7.0 Update 3 to 7.0 Update 3c, the path becomes similar to /VMware-Tools/productLocker/.
This issue is resolved in this release.