I'll probably spring for the Anker USB-A adapter, it'll be useful to have any way.
After days of testing, a mix of Direct Playing 4K DoVi/HDR10 (HEVC Main 10) on my 4K Apple TV and different media on other devices during the day and constant ping, mtr and iperf3across devices, I've determined this problem is totally random lol! Went 48 hours of TBs transferred between devices with iperf and a day of content playing, no problem, then randomly I'll see Link is down on the NIC and I can't ping it until it comes back up like it did this morning.
Might find a Linux community to share my syslog and see if any other suggestions for troubleshooting exist and make sure it isn't something else with my network/unmanaged switches. But I might be burning time/energy on broken hardware and time to give up on it.
@phanto I'll see if era ships to the US and make sure to be extra cautious of the listing description. Might also see if I can find a US equivalent.