I remember when bricking something meant it was totally unrecoverable. Now it means "temporarily not working but will automatically heal".
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.
Normally I'd have marked the entire subthread offtopic, but hutzlibu's comment deserves to be at the top, even if it does use the word "bricked" wrong.