I am updating this as I found my issue was right after updating I installed Docker on this system and Docker changed my iptables forwarding rules and broke what I had going for VMware. I rewrote my iptable rules to accommodate how Docker does things and now things are good again.
I suppose this provides another place to look, iptable rules.
One thing in particular with VMware Workstation is it does not support vlans. As my home computer is connected to vlans (I am a software engineer who does a lot of networking stuff, what can I say) and by default VMware Workstation does not handle it (they seem to think this is an "enterprise only" function ignoring people like me who use vlans on their desktop), what I had to do under Linux is create "host only" VMware software switches and bridge to them with the host OS. Using the default bridged network does not work as it listens in promiscuous mode to all traffic on the physical interface and does not understand vlan tagging. The host level bridges are to virtual interfaces that handle that particular vlan.
There is still the issue I hit where the software management program is broken under VMware 15.5 with the python library not found even though it is included with VMware. I had to copy the Python library to my current working directory to make it work.