And looking at the overlay source (dtc -O dts) , the hdmi1-8k and hdmi2-8k can not both be effective at the same time.
They also seem to nullify the opp-oc-24ghz overlay. If I remove them again, the HDMI output still works. Puzzling.
So I don't know if they actually have a made a difference (and only needed to be used once?) or whether the change and the start of HDMI working was a coincidence.