For OTAA resetting frame counters is not required.
Sending with the devices in close vicinity might cause crosstalk between channels resulting in downlinks at the wrong frequency because TTN instructs the gateway to respond at a frequency based upon the uplink frequency, if that is the wrong one your node won’t receive any answer as it is listening on the wrong frequency.
Can you use something like SDR to check if the gateway is actually sending any data when a join response is generated by the back-end?