These bypass NICs sound interesting, thanks, I'll have a look for them.
A port physical state watch script tends to be better. I don't know what lower end gear has it though, some may even support that as a mode of their "WAN monitoring" instead of actively sending probes. Worst case I know Ubiquiti Edgerouters let you run your own scripts on the Linux base and it'd be a matter of running "primary port up ? remove vlan from backup port and add vlan to primary port : remove vlan from primary port and add vlan to backup port" in a loop every second (there may even be a native feature for it though so check that first).