ART is not building VPA because it couldn't be enabled with the old manifests dir.

100%

See if these lines refer to the build being disabled:
https://github.com/openshift/ocp-build-data/blob/openshift-4.12/images/vertical-pod-autoscaler-operator.yml#L1-L3

# Disabling until upstream updates channels for 4.12
# ...or updates bundle dir to stable/
mode: disabled

content:
  source:
    dockerfile: Dockerfile.rhel7