What is bricked vs recoverable has always greatly depended on time and effort, individual skill level, available hardware/software tools, documentation, crypto keys, physical access, willingness to replace individual parts etc.
Sometimes, even within an org, some teams e-waste expensive devices that aren't bricked deeper than what other teams recover from as part of everyday workflow.
Taking a typical network device as an example, where do you draw the line? Driving to a remote location to plug the cable into another port, pressing a reset button, booting from USB, flashing a new firmware with TFTP, plugging in an external or internal console cable, opening the case and soldering a header to get access to the console, doing the same with no documentation, or an unknown (but maybe Google-able or reverse engineerable) password, flashing firmware with JTAG, shipping the device back to the engineers (or shipping an engineer to the device)...? It's always been arbitrary.