Upon re-reading it multiple times, I think I understand the following:
- Both of you tried to make a kernel+initramfs boot image out of the 4.38.23697 kernel and various /init payloads which perform different actions (USBMS, LED, ethernet, reboot, watchdog).
- All attempts were inconclusive after fastboot success (and you didn't provide any indication in the post nor to your LLMs to concretely distinguish failures).
- Your LLMs have been guessing at the boot image format mostly blindly, which may have resulted in the inconclusive results.
- The kernel cmdline may or may not be correct.
Neither of you have provided:
- What actually happens to the device when attempting to turn it on, nor what you consider "bricked" to be.
- UART logs.
- What state the "idle" device was in (was it plugged in? lights?).
- What the screen is showing now, and what the screen was showing before and after it was "idle".
- Actual concrete information about booti.
- Whether you have your own flash dumps we can look at.
- Your test boot images, and how you created them.
- Your host tooling, versions, platform, etc.
I also recommend looking at ntx_hwconfig (both the partition and the tool).
Also, malodayi, your (or the LLM's) original notes and logs would be much more useful than whatever that summary is supposed to be.