Zigbee and Matter/thread

Hello,
My garden is quite long and my zigbee network has hard to be reliable between the houses (main house and garage) in the ends of my garden.
In my main house I have a HA on a NUC, a Sonoff Dongle E with my zigbee devices. Now I plan to use Sonoff Max on the other end (the garage) of the garden but with Matter/thread as these devices seems cheeper.
Can I connect the Sonoff MAX in the garage over wifi to my router in the main building where I have my HA and then link the matter/thread controller over this wifi + ethernet link?
second thought… would the Sonhoff max be a worse “wifi extender” than anoter Asus router in mesh mode?
(I intend to dig down a !ground secure! ethernet cable in the future…)