Comment by geor9e

I don't know about most devices, but for all the ones I've messed with, eFuse anti-rollback always "bricked" them if you rolled back. It was a natural consequence of the firmware essentially being a binary with a USB flashing mode, plus a bootloader to continue into the operating system. If the firmware can't load at all due to failing eFuse check, then you can't load into flashing mode. The same thing would happen if you wrote garbage to the bootloader partition. That's enough for customers and journalists to call it "permanantly bricked". There might be some SOC recovery mode that lets you load a newer bootloader into RAM, but it would need some software tooling from the SOC manufacturer, and at that point few customers will figure it out.