Regardless of the recommendations, I regularly run into builds where "step 1" is to build a vSphere infrastructure. It's not until "step 2" that I reach "build a VM and promote it to create a domain".
This means that installing vCenter on a domain member is difficult - the domain doesn't exist yet.
I've never had an issue with this. I create a local account and run the service with this. I create a local DNS zone and point ESXi servers at that vCenter, meaning everything VMware related has functioning DNS before creating a domain.