I had what I think is the same problems as you, NAT fine to external, but bridged only connection is to other VMs on the same subnet, nothing outside the physical host.
Using VM Workstation 15.5.0 build-14665864
What I found was that there was crap in the .vmx file left over from a previous version of workstation, resulting in god knows what entries for the ethernet adapter.
What I had to do was
1 - Shut the VM down
2 - Edit and remove all network cards from within VMworkstation
3 - Remove the VM from the inventory
4 - Edit the .vmx file of the guest and delete all lines with reference to ethernet0. (there were about 6) (maybe make a copy of the .vmx file first just in case)
5 - Reattach the VM to the inventory
6 - Add a new network card
After then powering up the VM it got an IP from the DHCP server on the router and was able to ping out to the router.
Hope that's of some help