Are you absolutely married to the idea of ESXi? Because it sounds like TrueNAS Scale might be a better fit for your use case. Most of your requirements seem to be centred around storage and it can handle backing up to a remote out of the box.
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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After you install ESXi to the 256GB SSD, there may or may not be any space left over for the Installer to create a datastore. In other words, the SSD is small enough that ESXi may take the whole thing for itself, and not give you any usable space for VMs.
You'll have to install and see.
Installing to a USB thumbdrive would be the better option. Once booted ESXi runs entirely from RAM, so no problems with the thumbdrive wearing out after a few months.
It should take up to 138GB for boot but you can also change the settings during the installation: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/81166