Ok, I was stupid enough to fetch the latest nightly build and expect it to work flawlessly (well, played that game many times building openwrt from trunk, never had an issue .
Re-etching the latest legacy xenial (3.4.*) fixed the issues immediately, apt upgrade-ed 60+ packages within a minute (was failing within 2-3 with nightly), iozone also completed without any issues.
Iozone results with 4k blocks are a lot lower than in epic (SD cards benchmarks) thread, not sure if this is caused by legacy kernel or any other issues or misconfigurations on my side (default governor, etc, etc).
Anyway I'm quite happy my EVO+ card is fine (finding it broken would be a shame considering it costs more than OPiZero .
If anyone wants me to perform any tests with legacy, nightly or any other builds I'm ready to do so, otherwise I'll probably stick with legacy for a while (mb until mainline release).
I had an idea of putting uboot to SPI flash (my 512MB version got it from factory) and trying nightly with USB card-reader and same card (not like that'll prove anything), hopefully I'll find some spare time for that later.