@planedrop I have exactly the same issue. I've exported the disk as two files ( the flat one is 800GB) and the wheel is simply spinning 24 hours later. Did you manage to resolve this?
The direct import from ESXi didn't work for me either. My biggest criticism of this would be that there is no feedback to indicate whether it it working or not, an orange task appears, clicking to see the logs hangs indefinitely. I'm not sure if there is a way to upload the pair of files that make up the VMDK to the machine over SCP and then kick off the import from there.