Ran into an issue where esxtop was basically displaying a bunch of CSV data that was hard to make sense of in a terminal.

From reading here https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2001448

It appears that the issue is that the environment TERM variable is not specified.

echo $TERM

returns nothing.

To fix, specify the terminal to use

TERM=xterm

To get a list of terminals available, run the following

find /usr/share/terminfo -type f