I would say, in fact, it's better. A lot of the things ProxMox does out of the box would require both ESXi and vSphere. LXC and VM, Ceph and SDN are all native to the latest version of Proxmox. And since it's based on Debian you can do nice things to the underlying system that makes life easier. For example, in my homelab I can run Tailscale natively on the host which means full OOB management from anywhere. Proxmox also has a fantastic API at this point.
I feel as though, roughly 2 years ago, Proxmox became better in the simplistic manner of doing the right things like how ESXi became the defacto hypervisor. VMWare's antiquated management for upgrades of the entire ecosystem became a nightmare in the last 5 years. I worked in the NSX Security group for a while and just getting it installed internally was a nightmare of dependencies. RIP ESXi, the nostalgia will live on, but it was past its prime.
I feel as though, roughly 2 years ago, Proxmox became better in the simplistic manner of doing the right things like how ESXi became the defacto hypervisor. VMWare's antiquated management for upgrades of the entire ecosystem became a nightmare in the last 5 years. I worked in the NSX Security group for a while and just getting it installed internally was a nightmare of dependencies. RIP ESXi, the nostalgia will live on, but it was past its prime.