I used to flash daily updates, but that wasn't on an $1800 phone, and android was far from polished... These days other than flashing a factory image there's not much you can do without breaking a lot of things
Then I'm sure you experienced similar problems back then. The norse god never failed to restore bricks, broken modems, adding 1 to U, etc.. But yeah since the 9 series, the US models got more locked down. Thankfully, samsung has been good on features and security in exchange. Pretty happy besides the esim or lack there of
Never had a brick, but definitely had a few wonky updates, then at least it was a simple reflash as we had full system access, not so much the case these days
