VMware Homelab ESXI 8.0 Update 3e

I'm trying to build a VMware homelab with an Intel NUC as my first host. As they made ESXI 8.0 Update 3e free again I was able to download it from the Broadcom portal. Now I have an issue that my NVME disk is not getting recognized. A fix for this would be to use the community NVME fling in a custom ESXI image. To achieve this you need to have entitlements to download the depot files.

How does someone achieve this if you have no active Broadcom entitlements .... Am I forced to use a different brand NVME? Are there any other alternatives? (I don't have anything VMware related running at this point.)