The open-vm-tools config adjustment hook tries to open the config file for writing without checking if that file exists or not.
Thus if you remove open-vm-tools from package lists, image build fails on that hook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/root/30-openvmtools-configs.chroot", line 13, in <module>
with open('/etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf', 'w') as f:
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf'
E: config/hooks/live/30-openvmtools-configs.chroot failed (exit non-zero). You should check for errors.
P: Begin unmounting filesystems...
P: Saving caches...