When using GNOME inside VMware Workstation, with 3d accelerated video – and you resize your VMware Workstation window – GNOME will reset the screen to scale to the window – which is good – but if you have a "scale" setting other than 100% set, the screen will be kicked back to 100% scale, which is of course annoying if your are on a HiDPI display.

GNOME has built-in logic to switch back to 100% scale for any "new monitor". It seems to recognize the resized VMware Workstation window as a "new monitor". 

It would be nice if GNOME behaved better in this way and preserved your scale setting when you change the window size.