Two devices on same LAN can't play together

I've researched this to death and haven't found any concrete solutions to resolve this. To back up a bit, I'll say that when the game launched, my son and I played 2042 together online at launch on the same LAN (two completely separate EA accounts) on two separate PS5s each logged in with two separate PSN accounts with no problems at all. We put it down for a while and recently came back to it and it's been impossible to be in a party together and actually get into a game together. What happens every single time is:

With either of us as host of the party and only the two of us being in the party, as soon as the countdown to start the match ends, randomly one of us will get a black screen at which point we'll get kicked back to the main menu and the other will get into the game successfully... as I said, it's completely random who will actually get into the game, but what's not random and is repeatable every single time is that whoever doesn't get into the game will get kicked back to the main menu

Now to test if it was just a PS5 issue, I also have the game on Steam and am logged into to the same EA account in Origin as I am on my PS5 (it's my only EA account) and even with me being on PC and him on PS5, in the same party with Cross Play turned on for both of us, we get the same exact result as above, one will get a black screen and get kicked to the main menu and one will get in the game (same thing as above, it will be random how gets in).

So the next thing I'd naturally look at was my router. I have a high end custom pfSense router and I've tried all manor of configurations, but my most recent was to disable UPnP and hard code the BF2042 and PSN ports to the DHCP reserved addresses of each PS5. Static Route on the Outbound was enabled for both PS5s as well as pfSense is set to use Pure NAT with automatic outbound NAT Reflection as well... doing this has worked for every multiplayer game we've played with zero issues except this game. We both get NAT Type 2 when testing the connection to PSN. Here is a link to a pic of my NAT rules (also attached to this post):

https://imgur.com/a/QMHE5G9

This has been an exercise in persistence and patience and it's all the more frustrating that at launch, we played countless hours together in the game with all the same network hardware, etc.

Anyone that maybe has a similar setup or problems, would love to hear of your experiences.

Thanks