There are some existing questions related to this issue, however none of them are quite the same, nor do any of them provide a resolution. Here's the question which most closely fits my issue (but not my question, which is how to fix it, not work around it).
I've been using .local domains for a couple of years natively from Windows 10, no Bonjour or other products involved. Occasionally (like once every several weeks), it would stop resolving. Yesterday, that reduced to about 2-5 minutes of uptime after a reboot until .local domains stopped resolving.
The most recent answer on this question suggests that the problem is that Windows multicast would stop working after any network issues, and that a bugfix was being planned for update 21H1. I don't see any network issues happening on my machine (turning Wi-Fi off and on again doesn't resolve the issue), and since we're now at 22H2, any Windows update intended to resolve this seems unlikely.
Should I switch to using a non-native service such as Bonjour? Those seem to be blocked by Windows just as much as its native implementation, from what I've been reading on other questions.
UPDATE: I've given up on solving this for now. What I specifically wanted to avoid was the workaround of maintaining a hosts file of static IPs, but that's what I ended up having to do after even attempting to disable native mDNS and use Bonjour (I tried both directly installing it and via iTunes). It may be that these solutions are somehow incompatible with Home edition.
It remains unclear what changed in the last week which suddenly caused the issue. Nothing changed with my network or the various devices that I'm attempting to connect to from Windows (they remain accessible from non-Windows systems).
Also, for hostfile usage, I'm avoiding the .local pattern so that I can continue to monitor the situation. I'll update this question should anything change (either improvements or just not working at all even on boot-up).
UPDATE 2: after another 10 days (2023-03-22), I suddenly noticed that .local domains were working again and not just immediately after rebooting. This was definitely not the case a few days ago, even after the KB5023696 14th March update (the KB5023773 update from 21st Mar hasn't installed yet).
