Well, thank you everyone for your help, I've managed to resolve the issue.
Despite being virtualized the Aquantia NIC does not play nice with TrueNAS Core, I discovered this by passing an intel NIC through PCIE to the TN core machine and then everything started working. Then I changed the vswitch on ESXI to use the intel NIC and went back to vmxnet3 virtual NIC and it all performs properly, so it works virtualized or passed through, guess it's time to retire the aquantia card or use it elsewhere.