@mietek I can assure you there's no malicious intent to mislead you, why we would do that to our users is beyond me. Olivier is simply one of the most busy people I've worked with, and he still takes the time to come here and answer free users when he can. He might not have the time to scour the internet and github for the relevant patches and news for niche threads like this. We were not made aware of the cloud-init fix until just a few days ago when a patch was submitted. Cloud-init has been notoriously hard to support and document because the upstream project is constantly doing things like this, and as you noticed it can affect how it works on one OS version versus another very differently. If it were up to me we would drop built-in support for it because of this mess (and a lot of large projects have dropped it entirely and moved to Ignition, like CoreOS) but a lot of users still find it very useful so we continue to support it as best we can, baring with the mess going on upstream.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but Olivier is the founder and CEO of Vates, who is behind both XCP-ng and XOA. I welcome you to go to the ESXI forum and try and get the CEO of VMware to personally answer your questions, as a free user to top it off.