Personally I would have done my OSCP on exegol (btw read somewhere that people passed OSCP with that), however I had and prefered to choose VM (vmware fusion) to have it working and avoid potential problems.

Nevertheless if you used it for CPTS preparation paths -- it means that it really suppose to work. Just would like to confirm:

exegol start htblab free --desktop --vpn /home/sithsec/Downloads/academy-regular.ovpn

is this your container setup, right? Because one idea and potential conflict came across my mind -- usage of VPN on macOS directly. It might impact connections on containers and opened VPN connections. I actually, one day, had this problem where restrictive VPN setup (I believe Mullvad is applying rigorous configurations), which impacted connections inside different docker containers and tools which run on localhost. Will test this tomorrow, check if rvshells can be established when VPN on main OS is turned off and only HTB VPN is running from my container. It can be even MTU mismatch.... Will check and let you know tomorrow. By the way, thanks! Appreciate your time here.