As an additional data point, I went ahead and flashed the 2022.10 GA release to my N2 with orange 16GB eMMC, and so far it's working just as well as 2022.07 GA for me. Though not sure if there's any real benefit to 2022.10 over 2022.07 though if that version boots successfully, so if that seems to work for more people, probably makes sense to just stick with that. If I run into boot problems in the future, I'll roll back, but so far so good.
And fwiw Armbian has been super stable, which is why I was looking to switch in the first place. The official N2 builds from Odroid all use the old 4.9 kernel which is too old for Docker and Wireshark without workarounds, which were hard requirements for my use case. I tried a community made Debian build on the Odroid forums, but got a kernel panic overnight after just a day, and it was using EXT4 without LVM so harder to do snapshots without some workarounds, or manually trying to migrate to BTRFS and hope for the best. So I started looking for alternative Debian options and found Armbian, which has now been working fully stable for 3 days so far, though I'm continuing to actively monitor it. Plus the included Armbian eMMC install script made it really easy to use BTRFS, which I also wanted for snapshotted backups, which was icing on the cake.
Having working U-boot for eMMC booting was the missing piece for me to make the switch, so big thanks to @usual user for providing a potential solution and taking the time to post builds as well!