So last night I decided I was going the extreme route and starting over with my zwave network. With 30ish devices, this was no small task. I had several nodes on my network that were hanging around from a while ago that I could never get rid of in home assistant. Every time I would try to remove them, I would get an error. I am using the HUSBZB USB controller. I thought I could just change the keys in the zwave-js config that would assign the USB stick to a new zwave network. Apparently it doesn’t work that way. The node information is all stored on the USB stick so if you want to start over, you have to remove those nodes one way or another. If you aren’t getting errors removing nodes, you could do this from Home Assistant one device at a time for failed nodes or using exclusion mode for active nodes. This was not an option for me.
I found a method to reset the USB stick using Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio 5 software using a windows pc. (You need a free account with them to download)
(https://www.silabs.com/developers) I can post instructions if anyone is in the same boat as me. But in short, for the HUSBZB stick, you need to apply the CP210 drivers to the device (also from Silicon Labs). Then I followed these instructions to get to the zwave control. Once you get that installed, there is an option to reset the device which wipes out all nodes.
I’ve added nearly all of my zwave devices back in, and the network seems to be responding faster and, so far, no devices have dropped into the dreaded “presumed dead” state. I’ll update in a couple days if all continues to work.