Whether something is irrevocably bricked or not depends upon what tooling, documentation, and skills you have. Someone releasing a new tool that makes it easier to recover/unbrick doesn't make it not have been bricked in the first place...
From wikipedia brick(electronics) is quite relevant that bricking is not necessarily permanent.
Some devices that become "bricked" because the contents of their nonvolatile memory are incorrect can be "unbricked" using separate hardware (a debug board) that accesses this memory directly.[5] This is similar to the procedure for loading firmware into a new device when the memory is still empty. This kind of "bricking" and "unbricking" occasionally happens during firmware testing and development. In other cases software and hardware procedures, often complex, have been developed that have a good chance of unbricking the device. There is no general method; each device is different. There are also user-created modifier programs to use on bricked or partially bricked devices to make them functional. Examples include the Wiibrew program BootMii used to fix semi-bricked Nintendo Wiis, the Odin program used to flash firmware on Samsung Android devices,[6] or the fastboot Android protocol which is capable of reflashing a device with no software installed.[6]
Does this not assume that ‘bricked’ means walled out and entry is blocked?
The word appears to originate from the idea that a device has been turned into a brick. This seems a new meaning to me, as ‘bricked’ isn’t a word that previously meant ‘to turn the thing into a brick’.
