Dude, they disabled a capability of the hardware it shipped with, with a firmware update in the OD update. I have one of the affected Minis. I bought a computer that shipped with gigabit Ethernet and they removed that feature. I don’t care if I could buy an external adapter. Would you think it was ok of Nvidia retroactively capped you 120fps GPU at 12fps because you can just buy another GPU?
I have a 2012 Mac Mini. It runs gigabit just fine. Might be a firmware bug that they never patched?
Edit: And no, I would not take that from Nvidia. But, I don’t think this is intentional, or else my mini would also be affected.
I’m genuinely glad for you and the other poster here who got by unscathed. Maybe we have slightly different chipsets. Mine is bcm57766/b57nd60a.
I don’t have the actual mini on hand right now, its serving as a home server and I am on vacation. I’ll check when I get back. Btw, what version of OSX/macOS are you running on? I had no problem with Catalina and even Ventura (OpenCore).