That is interesting. That detail isn't mentioned in the "vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive". The whole of chapter 4 has been written on the basis that at least some hosts have survived the failure event.
So you're suggesting that the hosts' HA agents are 'remembering' the restart try count for all VMs in its recovery list, during a power cycle. Assuming that is true, that has some serious implications, particularly for us, because this would imply that during a period of shutdown, none of the retry attempts would be be counting down. In normal circumstances with a 5 retry maximum, attempts to restart a VM cease after 30 minutes. However if a system is knocked out severely and it is hours (or days) before a clean restart is attempted, then this clean controlled system start might be hampered by HA suddenly attempting to restart VMs when power is restored to hosts.
I'm sorry but I find this hard to believe and there must be some other factor at work on your system surely?