It's no longer needed, but maybe someone else can get something out of this.
To me, ESXi feels extremely unstanble because of problems like these, because it's such a custom system, not based on a generic unix distribution that would come with normal drivers.
Which is why I'm (slowly) moving to Proxmox, which uses a normal filesystem, normal drivers, and normal software. And being based on plain Debian, it can update itself.