How to fix an apparenlty missing kernel module dependency specification?

I've encountered a relatively common problem with ASIX AX88179 USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, where it was not working at all, or was working sporadically, and dmesg was showing errors like

[23552.344134] ax88179_178a 2-1:2.1 eth1: Failed to read reg index 0x0000: -32

Searching on-line, I've found reports of this or similar problems without satisfactory solutions or explanation.

After some debugging, it turned out that the problem is solved if cdc_mbim module is loaded before ax88179_178a. The following solves the problem until the next reboot:

# rmmod ax88179_178a# modprobe cdc_mbim# modprobe ax88179_178a  # optional

I've checked that cdc_mbim is not declared a dependency of ax88179_178a, neither directly, nor indirectly.

How can I fix the dependency specifications of ax88179_178a to make it depend on cdc_mbim, so that cdc_mbim be always loaded automatically before ax88179_178a?