replaced Eero 6 with 6+ now lots of dropped packets

I have had an Eero 6 for about 3 years and starting about a month ago it got really flaky. Everyone in the house was seeing warnings about their wifi connection had no internet etc. Power-cycling the Eero would (temporarily) resolve the issue. My experience has long been that consumer wifi only lasts about 3 years, so the only other 'troubleshooting' I did was to order a replacement 6+.

Now I have the 6+ setup and working and my VPN is very unreliable. I started a continuous ping and I can see lots of dropped packets. Is this my new Eero? I see comments here about new firmware causing packet-drop problems.

I am also wondering if my old Eero 6 was maybe ok but instead I was suffering from a bad firmware? I only say that because the wifi problems seemed to stop over the weekend, i.e., the last couple of days, and now I see (here on Reddit) that there was a recent update 7.17.1

Finally, when I first connected the 6+ it was detected by the app but then reported that it did not have internet connectivity. So I power-cycled my cable modem. Could that have destabilized something?

Thank you for any suggestions