Thanks for the super detailed reply and the info about the 21.10.1+ drivers. I'll have to try dropping to some lower drivers if my issues come back....which I say because...
I needed to come back and point out a dumb thing I noticed and resolved and point it out incase it helps anyone else. I accidentally bumped my computer case and noticed a blue LED on my video card turn red for a second and then go back to blue. After jostling the PCIe power cord to the GPU a bit, I noticed it would go back and forth from red to blue. So I reseated the connector and ensured moving the cord no longer caused the LED to change colors. Then I had to restart the PC and re-enable the video card (windows + the AMD driver doesn't like the video card randomly losing its power, so it had marked it as disabled). And voila, video and such works much better on my second monitor now. So yeah, TL

R, make sure the power cords to your video card are properly seated, sometimes they seem like they are, but actually aren't.