Is a full year of uptime actually achievable? What's your experience with wireless protocol stability?

This sounds like RF interference to me.
Maybe the dongle is not on an extension cable and away from other RF sources, or you are on a channel that is busy with WIFI interference, or something like that.
I have 3 zigbee networks, 2 in one house, and I don’t see any of that. The Home Assistant Cookbook - Index