If I told you what I was working on you would certainly be like “how tf does he not know this?” but I have… several ethernet ports available for this :).
Appreciate you taking the time to write this all out!
It would allow me to be connected to both the bridge and the only Ethernet port eventually but this required me deleting the connections I made from nmcli entirely first and starting over.
I have quite literally no idea what the difference was THIS time, but it now finally acts as a bridge for the VMs and they all have a different local static IP :)