The following won’t be of much help…
Today I’ve tested the vmdk image for about 2 hours (although not on vmware) and didn’t hit the ports problem.
From what I could grasp, the vmdk image is generated by converting the qcow2 one.
After dnf update, noticed a recent python 3.11 update, but for that short testing period (manual reboots included) didn’t break anything.
Can you share results from the following commands?, (as the open/closed ports seem to match another than the public and default firewalld zone):
firewall-cmd --get-active-zones
firewall-cmd --get-default-zone
firewall-cmd --list-all