(NOTE: Jump straight to answer 5 if you want a summarized list of the 3 workarounds I identified so far for this issue - continue here if you want some history on the progress and how I ended up realizing each one)
I have the same issue since probably kernel 4.10 as well. Sometimes it just throws the ext4_set_page_dirty+0x44/0x60 exception in dmesg while others it freezes my box the same way you describe (I also cannot perform a clean shutdown).
Unfortunately, downgrading the kernel is not a viable option to me. Fedora upgrades packages very often and even if I install kernel 4.9, I cannot compile the vmware modules because they require gcc-6.3 when compiling them for kernel 4.9.
So, I started looking for alternatives. Since the exception explicitly mentions the ext4_set_page_dirty kernel routine, I guessed that if the VM files are in a different fs the issue possibly would not occur, so I created a separate partition for the VM files and formatted it with xfs at first and then with btrfs. In both cases the result was successful, i.e., no more ext4_set_page_dirty exception and no more crashes (tested many times already, but I just realized this workaround today).
I guess the issue occurs due to some race condition in the ext4 code since kernel 4.10, but I'm not a kernel specialist. I'm guessing this because the chances of a crash to happen (in addition to the exception in dmesg that always happen regardless of the crash) increases if I'm executing any disk intensive task while the shutdown in performed. I'm not sure if VMware or the kernel developers should fix it and this certainly requires a lot of debugging. In any case, it would be a good starting point to look at the kernel changes in ext4 fs code from 4.9-4.10.
What surprises me most is that I don't find many references of this issue in google. This makes me believe that this is not affecting much people. Just checking for similarities, I'm using a Fedora 27 host with Windows 7 Pro guest installed in two different computers and both have the same issue. In one of these machines the guest OS is an almost fresh install of Win7 (just a few days ago) with minimum additional software. What they have in common is that they both have Norton Antivirus installed (I didn't try to reproduce the issue without NAV).
Hope the different filesystem is a viable alternative for you or whoever read this post, at least until vmware or the kernel developers fix it. This is a very annoying an critical bug.