I have it working fine on 6.5 by disabling the new usb driver vmkusb introduced in this version, and reverting to the legacy usb driver - https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2147650.
SSH into esxi, and run the command esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE. Then reboot. That should resolve the time out issue.
(I have done this on two different machines, each now running for a couple of months on esxi 6.5 without any issues).