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I don't know how Starlink's satellites are architected, but the spacecraft I am familiar with has several different boot images with automatic failover. For that system, you would have to replace/corrupt multiple of the actual boot images to brick the system completely.

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what if the boot image itself isn't corrupted but rather there's other persistent data which causes the firmware to get stuck / bootloop?

This is more or less what happened to the Mazda head unit firmware in the link I posted.

There are failsafe images that are fully self contained. I would hope that even Starlink satellites are engineered to a higher standard than an automotive head unit.

There also must be some seriously robust out-of-band systems in place here.

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