I was able to make some progress with DDC regarding this issue.
I was vindicated in my stance that it was not an issue on my end but a DDC issue
They are having the products team work on sending new/accurate events for all their customer sites
DDC has never officially support GA event tracking due to "reporting being incorrect or misleading"
They did confirm that the GA code that was getting VDP events and was present on hundreds of other sites was theirs.
When I told them to remove that GA account from my site until this is fixed they said it was not possible.
So basically, per usual, someone dropped the ball in the roll out of their New VDP and/or they did not see the need to build their site in a way to allow for dealers to track events on their own websites outside of the dealer.com analytics tools.