Hey everyone, thanks for your kind suggestions. At the same time I was working with Netgate directly as I personally became convinced pretty quickly that this was a hardware issue.
After 2 days of installing new firmware from console, resetting settings, and turning things off, Netgate eventually agreed it was hardware and gave me an RMA. Now I'm in the waiting game between shipping the device back and getting a new one. I have to say, having to pay return shipping for a dead on arrival device kinda blows. So does 2 days of hours spent troubleshooting (a few times with techs who clearly were convinced the fault was me misconfiguring things).
New customer here, not sure if I'll be a repeat one after this experience. What's worse: Ubiquiti where they lie about being hacked (which is why I picked netgate over the EdgeRouter) or this?
But I can say the community (y'all who replied above) seem pretty great!