I was doing some configuring on the firewall regarding my last post and found no matter how I set rules on the firewall LAN packets were being reported as blocked under "default deny rule" regardless of how much I opened the rules up on one machine. I have another firewall with the same setup (HW and SW) that doesn't report issues like this one. Out of frustration and troubleshooting sake I did a factory reset on the problem machine and spun up a completely new vanilla install with only 1 client (v19.7.8) in which looking at the logs looked normal, then I changed the LAN source on the LAN rules from "LAN net" to "any" for both rules, applied the changes, and LAN packets started to be reported as blocked on a fairly regular basis. I did a factory reset, checked logs and found reports returned to normal. I then reset states and encountered the same phenomena. During all this I didn't notice any obvious failure of connectivity on the client side, but it is troubling since I was using the log data to get connectivity issues ironed out on the other machine. What could I be missing, or is this normal? Thanks!
I was able to finally fix this, it took reinstalling opnsense from scratch with no import. Somehow if you start messing around with the firewall for testing it permanently changes something and you cannot go back without wiping the HD and starting fresh, at least that's what my experience has been with the first two machines I've setup so far.