I have successfully followed this tutorial to get an I2S soundcard (ES9023 TeraDak clone) working on the NanoPi Neo. I had no issues and it worked the first time without surprises on Armbian 5.24.
I did have to clone and compile the sunxi-tools from https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools#buildingto get the bin2fex and fex2bin utilities.