I have used both Vmware ESXI and Proxmox.

For home labs I would proably go with Proxmox as it is free and has better hardware support.

ESXI is a very solid product as well but the free version has no backup support. But it is one of the leaders in the industry so it is worth learning if you work in sysadmin.

It depends. Are you talking about VMs you will be using on your desktop or on a headless server?

Proxmox is great for server management but the way it handles storage puts off a lot of new users and honestly still drives me nuts. For example the native zfs webmanagement doesn't give you any options for dataset management, compression, or encryption options. If you want to configure that you'll have to do it through the terminal or with another tool like cockpit zfs manager (which has been discontinued by the dev). Cockpit also has a virtual machine management plugin, but in my experience cockpit leaks memory which causes a bunch of other issues.

If you're talking about desktop, virt-manager is pretty great. Never really found any reason to look for alternatives. You could also technically install xorg on proxmox just like any other linux package but I wouldn't recommend it.