I have a spare ‘sold for use with older Google Chromecasts / Amazon Fire TV’ dongles that you plug a microUSB power supply and Ethernet cable into, then plug into the Chromecast/Fire TV to give it both power and a more reliable internet connection.
Do these work with the Pi Zero 2W when plugged into its power socket? It’d be one way around the relative unreliability of Wi-Fi vs Ethernet.
If not, would a ‘normal’ USB-Ethernet dongle work in its normal USB port work, given a USB hub so you can plug in both the Ethernet dongle and the magic cable to connect to the PC?
I have one of those floating around I’ll test with, I think it should work because under the hood Chromecast/Android is Linux and uses drivers that Google upstreamed and I’ve used it on microUSB phones in the past. The issue might be the same as the USB Ethernet dongle.
The USB-Ethernet dongle would not work, because that puts the device in “host mode”, and it needs to be in OTG mode to send keystrokes. You need an SPI ethernet adapter that doesn’t mess with the USB mode to get 10Mbps ethernet, which is plenty for the video the zero2w supports.
This is the same reason that a microUSB hub or one with ethernet doesn’t work, to use those you have to use a RPi Pico as a Pico HID or a ch9329 usb to serial and serial to HID to do an alternate connection mode that works when it is a USB host.