The HCL is a lot less critical these days, as most kit is supported in one way or another now.
I use both ESX and ESXi, and mainly not free as i'm also a Veeam silver reseller and you can't back up the free ESXi hypervisor due to VMware enforcing that a couple of years ago.
However, neither hypervisor is too different from the other now and both have the restriction on the initial datastore.
I've had good experiences with Adaptec kit in the past, but was just trying to see whether there were competing cheaper options, as Adaptec has always been a bit pricey in comparison.