I agree, it would be great to determine whether there's enough disk space available to delete the snapshots, but that's not easy. Anyway, what has been deleted/cleared is the .vmsd file, a small text file which keeps track of the snapshots. Please provide the file list I asked for and attach the .vmsd file (if it contains any data) to see whether this can be recreated. Other than recreating the .vmsd file we could clone the virtual disk to a new one using vmware-vdiskmanager (with merging the snapshots into the new virtual disk) and replace it in the VM's configuration file, if there's enough disk space left.
André