On the 16th of September, a KB article was published by VMware, which contains statements of Removal of SD card/USB as a standalone boot device option.
USB/SD is not the right choice going forward! Why? The volume of reads/writes to and from the OS-DATA partition continues to increase with every release, which means that the lower grade devices will simply wear out faster.
Options for future versions of ESXi ( after 7.x)
When you buy new hardware make sure to have a proper persistent storage device,
Like a Dell Boss Card card or HPE OS boot Devices
Options for 7.x
What are the fixes that will help with SD/USB issues that customers are seeing?
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83963
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-70u2c-release-notes.html
(Please look for USB device and Storage stack issues fixed with this release)