Full support from Proxmox isn’t cheap, compared to even the new prices on VMware, if you look at the per processor cost that small businesses often have.

You're joking, right? VSphere is AT LEAST 1400 per year for the base license, that hasn't even got any support tickets - one Ticket is at least 300, 5 tickets is around 1200. Proxmox Full support starts at 340 Euros - with 3 Support tickets included. Then there's also the fact, that Proxmox doesn't have core limitations - meaning, you need at least two VSphere licenses for a 64-Core EPYC CPU. Oh, you want advanced networking or storage services? That's even more.

As I said - it depends on processor count. I know a number of small businesses that will be paying $5k/year for VMware, not much more than Proxmox top tier (which is what they would want). Proxmox is about $1500 per processor, so would be $3k-$6k/year for these businesses. That’s a trivial difference when you look at VMware already being installed and running, no transition costs, no risk of migration. You’d burn up a few $k difference with a single issue.

WTF? You can't even compare the 5k/year for VMware, just beacuse of the the single fact, that proxmox has UNLIMITED support tickets in the top tier. Not only that - it's 1,1k per processor without any core limit - VSphere still has that ridiculous 32-Core Limit. In many cases, VMware also has support times up to 24 hours - proxmox has max. 2 hours

Frankly, as much as VMware annoys the shit out of me, I couldn’t recommend migrating to Proxmox for those businesses, today. At best I’d recommend planning a transition when they need to upgrade servers, and do it early as a parallel install to give transition time for the business.

SMB doesn’t have the luxury of test labs for this stuff - they don’t have the cash flow/finance room to justify it.

If they don't, they don't have the cash or finance room to justify their IT, period. For most SMBs, IT has become the utter lifeline for everything they do, that's basically like when you are a machine shop without power. Meaning, the company is dead in the water for a serious period of time.