I think it has something to do with the embedded switch and a timing problem. The boards boot fine in the baseboard, bit don't get DHCP service in the clusterboard.
When you use a microSD with a modified device tree, it works on both, but apt update; apt upgrade can overwrite the device tree and on the next boot, no network.
If I were good with sed I could probably engineer an automatic fix to run aftewr upgrade that would decompile, patch and recompile the device tree.