If you have a Python3 environment, you can play around with the text file to replace the contents of the metadata. The longContentID and UUID were taken from the vmware.log that was in the test.zip. You can see that there is a virtualHWversion entry in the VMDK descriptor. So if you created using version 16.x software, the virtual disk descriptor might be virtual hardware version 18 (16.0/16.1) or 19 (16.2).
AFAIK, the boot information should only be in the nvram if the VM is using UEFI. From the log, the firmware="efi" entry was not there, so I suppose that it is using BIOS and not UEFI. So the new VM you could should also be using BIOS. In the past, a VM with virtual BIOS can safely delete the nvram without worry. Aside from that, the vmsd would also need to be removed and the dictionary entries related to vTPM from the vmx would also have to be removed.
But from your screenshot, it looks like it has 4 partitions. The MBR2GPT tool will only work if it has 3 partitions. You would need to have the GPT partition to have UEFI VM to boot and you need UEFI for vTPM to work.
Anyway, try to get the old virtual disk boot again first if you still want to continue to do so.
