No. Cables don’t have internal circadian rhythms telling them what time of day it is

What

Perhaps they are trying to use a wpa2 password on a wpa3 network

Honestly it would save you a lot of time by just renaming the network and reconnecting the devices, you would be done by now

As long as your access point isn’t also a dhcp server you shouldn’t have to do any of that

1.2 or 2.1 should both work. If you use 1.2 make sure your router isn’t starting the address pool that low

What ip are your devices getting from dhcp