Apologies for the delay. On my laptop, it does get quarantined and I was able to restore it. Narrowing down the list accumulated over the past 10 years, Eset was triggered on one specific line (made it quite easy, two lines would have been harder to figure out) which still routes to 0.0.0.0. I decided to rerun a scan on my desktop and Eset was triggered on two other hosts file, one in use by git and the other by WSL but this could be explained by them being automatic copies of my windows hosts file.
As I've narrowed the list down to the specific line that triggered it; I still cannot explain why Eset would be triggered but as this is a line I've had from the beginning and since then unused for years I've decided to remove it and call it a day. Only thought it was odd that Eset was not triggered by actually visiting that website.