Meross plugs (MSS210) & MAC address

I have a few Meross plugs, which seem to have been working fine with Alexa (with the odd lost of contact requiring it to be redicovered). I’m now trying to integrate these into HA (I’m very much a 2 day novice), and using the ‘Meross LAN’ addon (still using the Meross Cloud) it seemed to be going well.

However, I find that the devices frequently lose contact, and investigating on my network this seems to be because the MAC address changes … I can see this both at my router and with ‘nmap’. The manufacturer (OUI?) first 3 hex numbers are either: 48:E1:E9 (Meross), or 2A:EE:52 (locally generated??). The last three hex numbers remain constant.

Has anyone else observed this behaviour, and if so, how do you deal with it, since I thought that the MAC address forms part of the UUID ID of the device.

Well after a lot of detective work and reading, I have found the culprit, if not yet a satisfactory solution. The MAC addresses are being changed by my TP-Link RE650 wifi extender using a ‘MAC proxy’ technique, whereby the first three hex numbers of connecting device MACs are changed to that of the extender. This is apparently not a bug, but rather a feature, and it is not able to be disabled.