When Broadcom announced the purchase a year or so ago, I abandoned all further VMWare certs, and put the time into getting my head around the alternatives.
I still have to use VMWare for 90% of my job, but I’m absolutely treating it like a locked-in platform, and assuming that anything I learn to do in VMWare, I need to understand the underlying concepts, not just their interpretation, and how I can do similar things on other platforms.