Adding another comment since the edit window on my sibling reply has elapsed. To be clear, I'm an IT professional who knows how to restore a device from boot me

Adding another comment since the edit window on my sibling reply has elapsed. To be clear, I'm an IT professional who knows how to restore a device from boot media. I once managed a university computer lab, and wrote the linux-based image management software for 2000+ campus computers. I've written my own hobby operating, including the boot an initialization process. I thought any problem encountered reinstalling an OS is something I could handle. But that was not the case. Near as I could tell when I followed up with Apple after the incident, the boot process involved the security chip reading some data off the drive and validating it before handing off control. If that data (which is on the Apple reserved partition) was wiped, the firmware would not boot. And since the security chip was configured to not boot from media (the default state, IIRC), it was effectively bricked. So the very first generation of TouchBar MacBooks would not boot into recovery mode if you wipe the drive, nor would they boot any kind of recovery media. It's a state that required shipping to Apple for refurbishment to fix. It's my understanding that this was fixed in later models, perhaps even as a result of my incident.