I just noticed in the Processor Identification Utility screenshot you posted it shows that Virtualization Technology and EPT have an X mark instead of a check. Is Virtualisation enabled in the UEFI of the Inspiron 5502 that you have? From the service manual, it should be ON by default.
https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/inspiron-15-5502-laptop_service-manual_en-us.pdf#page=71
Plus if VT-x was off in the UEFI, power on of other VMs (not just Windows 98) would also fail.
The latest CPU that I have is the i7-8700K. My best guess is that there could be some differences in the EDX register of CPUID leaf 7 as this register has been used by Intel to indicate presence/absence of fixes to the different Spectre bug variants. I am not aware of any announcement whether Intel deprecated 16-bit instructions in the 11th gen CPUs, which an old OS like Windows 98 is likely to be still be using.
Here is the EDX register of my i7-8700K (in bold red) from a vmware.log of one of my VMs.
I005: hostCPUID level 00000007, 0: 0x00000000 0x029c6fbf 0x40000000 0x9c002600
If you don't have the vmware.log of the Windows 98, any vmware.log of any VM within the same host should give the same information.
