Hey man I have no idea if it is the same, I’m a noon, but I had issues with a kernel update recently with my Debian home server and lost Ethernet too. I couldn’t fix but I reverted the kernel update and voila my ethernet started working again. If this bothers you and like me you don’t have much knowledge years you could try that .

Hey just passing to say I saw your post and decided to update my Debian server …took me an hour to find that the rtl driver just stopped working and I had to revert to older kernel…never done it before haha…

Arr!