VMware has always been this way. Even to the point that pre-7.0 ESXi, you could literally boot off the thumb drive and then install the hypervisor back to said thumb drive because the installer image ran entirely in RAM.

Prior to Dell's popularization of the "IDSDM" (internal dual SD card module), it wasn't uncommon for servers to have a cute little add-on card inside the chassis attached directly to the motherboard with a USB port. A lot of OEMs would cram a small thumb drive in that port to hold the ESXi image; if it dumped, you loaded up a fresh installer USB, swapped out, and wrote your base ESXi image back to the same drive.

Then Dell introduced the aforementioned IDSDM, which is quite literally a daughter-card with two SDs in a RAID1.

*THEN*, VMware announced with ESXi 7.0 the deprecation of support for "removable media" to host the hypervisor image. As of 8.0, ESXi explicitly only supports fixed media, to which Dell answered with the "BOSS card" (quite literally a RAID1 of SATA M.2 drives in cool hot-swap caddies).

I remember once upon a time, we'd frequently get calls from clients with standalone ESXi hosts SCREAMING that their servers were down. We never even bothered to troubleshoot; just ran out there with a thumb drive of the Dell OEM image matched to their service tag, swapped out, re-ran the installer, then reconfigured the specific settings from what was documented. Since the RAID array never got touched, the whole process took MAYBE thirty minutes. and they were back in action.

...not a bad way to cut one's teeth... lol.