So…
My experience lead me to understand that the issue was being caused by the PBR Material.
I switched it for a StandardMaterial with no emissiveColor or Texture and worked fine.
Not sure if the HighLight Layer, just like the Glow Layer, when activated grabs everything emissive and alongside what is added to it…
In pure javascript it worked fine, when transictioning to REACT it worked has shown above.
My next step will be to better understand PBR Materials atributes and the Blender to Babylon transiction:
@carolhmj Thanks again.