I'm with you on that. There are efforts underway to get plain-old Linux running, but it's some time away as this chip only went into mainline as of kernel 6.0
No big loss though, it hasn't been used in years.
Not sure what happened in your case, I flashed many ROMs and ran the script against them to see if anything bad would happen. No issues.
In any case it won't be a Hard Brick. Power off, hold [volume-up] insert power jack and tap the [power] button 10 times. (I think. I lost my remote ages ago and can't check.)