OS 12.1 turned my USB docking station into a partial brick....

I tried safe mode and that didn't work.

I did manage to find a solution seconds ago but this is very strange. Please keep in mind all of my hardware sits on a high shelf, no children or pets in the home, the dock and its attachments do not move ever. The odds of downlink cable having physical damage is near zero. I even went as far as trying the kensington provided downlink cable with my wife's dock and windows PC. 100% good, the downlink cable is not the issue. It supported 2 4k monitors, hardwired gigabit ethernet etc. She has a similar Windows PC setup to my mac setup.

I was looking around on some other forums and found something about OS 12.x getting very particular about the USB3.1 downlink cable (cable that goes from the dock to the mac). As sort of a last ditch effort, I removed the downlink cable that came with the kensington, (that one that tested fine only moments prior with my wife's setup), and swapped out for the apple supplied out of the box USBC mac power supply cable. My hardwired ethernet came back to life, as did my external hard drive that was plugged into the dock.

My only conclusion at this point is that the other forum was right, and OS 12.x wants a USB 3.1 cable (even though the dock is 3.0) and will mistakenly judge a proper USB 3.0 cable as a USB2 cable. I wish I was making this up, never seen anything like this before.