I wonder what power level they used for their “interstellar shout”. DSS-43 has the capability to go to 400kW at S-band although I don’t think that has ever been used. Normal command uplinks are done at 70kW so they may have turned the wick all the way up for this. A 2-deg antenna offset is a loss of around 6dB so that would imply they would need nearly all of the 400kW to restore the link margin. Not much technical info on the NASA report though:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause