No worries at all, these things keep the job interesting . To be fair, I've learned a ton troubleshooting this issue. I also apologize if this post caused anyone trouble.
This was an oversight on my part. I accounted for the specific datastore but not the host in my one-liner to recreate the issue. I was able to create the new vm on the same host & datastore as the template from PowerCLI. I don't quite understand the difference between the PowerCLI version of this command and the Web client since I do not typically specify the host for new builds, but it is entirely likely that the web client picked the same host because storage DRS could see an error I did not. So now I get to go figure out where the network is not supporting jumbo frames. Thanks for the help everyone. I'm very excited to see where this goes.
All the best,
Leander