Further testing has revealed an unfortunate side effect of this vlan0 use. Using virtio for both wan/lan interfaces results in significantly higher cpu usage.
I can't compare apples/apples yet because I haven't gotten pf 23.01 to recognize eapol traffic when nic is in passthrough. However, this does work great with utm.
Running speed tests (speedtest windows app), download is saturated and upload is about 90-95% of line speed in pf. Cpu usage is a good 2-4x more compared to utm w/ wan in pass through. This is especially prevalent on the upload. In terms of watts;
utm (pass through) - ~105 watts
pf - ~115w (download) , 150-155w upload
Multiple queues are enabled in the virtio setting for both (at 4, as 4 vcpu's are allocated to pf vm).
With utm (pass through), upload saturates fully.
When I get a chance to take the network down again I'll try pf with passthrough using -vlanhwfilter option to see if that passes eapol traffic on the igb interface (i211).
This has all been quite the rabbit hole. In fact one i'd love to avoid but will be confronted with sooner or later as utm is going EOL. Office date is 6/2026, but it's been eol for some time now with no feature updates in at least 2 years, and bare minimal bug fixes along the way.