making enemy ships detect and dodge projectiles in a 2d spaceship game

I have a "2d" (the game is actually 3d, while the camera is top-down orthogonal 2d style) space shooter game based on the "Space Shooter" tutorial project. I'm working on adding enemies. I want the enemies to try to avoid the player bolts. I spent few hours trying several approaches, but no cigar. Need some input

1. I tried making the bolt prefab (the player's shots) to have a Nav Mesh Obstacle component. This causes the enemy ship to dodge the bolts 'no matter what' at ridiculous speed, even though the enemy ship's NavAgent speed is set. If I have to describe it it's more like the NavAgent geometry and the Nav obstacle (the bolts) geometry can't touch, and thus the fast moving obstacle "pushes" the agent out of the way. This is obviously not desirable, the enemy ships should try to dodge incoming shots, but often fail so they can actually get hit.

2. I made a Trigger collider component on an empty child object, in front of the enemy ship to detect when a projectile enters it. Kinda like a vision cone (there's no built in cone collider so it's just a rectangular box), where I can adjust its length to change how early the enemy can detect incoming projectiles. Then the plan is to then use NavAgent's SetDestination to move out of the way. Now the problem is both the enemy's basic collider, and this new "vision" collider Triggers when the projectile enters any of them, even though the script is attached to the child GameObject (which only contains the vission collider), so the enemy ship would explode when either collider detects the bolt. I can't put these 2 colliders on separate layer because I need the projectile to be able to trigger both the physical collider and the vision collider, just the correct one at a time.

This seems like would be a common problem but I couldn't find any solutions from googling.

Thanks

The dodger script attached to the child GameObject that has the vision trigger collider

 public class Dodger : MonoBehaviour {
     public EnemyController owner;
 
     private int hazardsSeen = 0;
 
     void OnTriggerEnter( Collider other ) {
         if ( other.CompareTag("Hazards") ) {
             if ( hazardsSeen == 0 ) {
                 owner.StartDodging(other.transform.position.x);
             }
             hazardsSeen++;
         }
     }
 
     void OnTriggerExit( Collider other ) {
         if ( other.CompareTag("Hazards") ) {
             hazardsSeen--;
             if ( hazardsSeen == 0 ) {
                 owner.StopDodging();
             }
         }
     }
 
 }
 

Relevant Part from enemy controller script

 public class EnemyController : MonoBehaviour {
     public Transform playerTransform;
 
     public float desiredDistance; //how far to move in front of player
  
     NavMeshAgent navAgent;
     
     void Start() {
         navAgent = GetComponent<NavMeshAgent>();
         nextFire = firstFireDelay;
         shotSpawn = transform.Find("Shot Spawn");
         
         SetDestination();
     }
 
 
     void SetDestination(bool dodge = false, float hazardsX = 0) {
         if ( !dodge ) {
             // set destination to desiredDistance away in front of the players
             Vector3 targetDestination = new Vector3(
                 playerTransform.position.x,
                 0,
                 playerTransform.position.z + desiredDistance
                 );
             navAgent.SetDestination(targetDestination);
 
         } else { 
             // else dodge, move perpendicular to incoming's x
             Vector3 targetDestination = new Vector3(0, 0, transform.position.z);
             if ( transform.position.x > hazardsX ) { //if ship is to the right of the incoming
                 targetDestination.x = 5f;
             } else {
                 targetDestination.x = -5f;
             }
             navAgent.SetDestination(targetDestination);
         }
     }

     public void StartDodging(float x) {
         // x is the hazard's vector3 x value
         SetDestination(true);
     }
 
     public void StopDodging() {
         SetDestination(false);
     }
 }