On the OrangePi One at least, emac reset when an ethernet cable is not plugged in seems to break ethernet. Soft reset will fail, even with increasing the delay and retries to wait for up to 20 seconds. This can be reproduced across at least two different OrangePi One's by simply leaving ethernet cable unplugged when awg attaches. Whether it's plugged in or not through u-boot process makes no difference.
Skipping the reset in this configuration doesn't seem to cause any problems, tried across many many reboots with and without ethernet cable plugged in.