This is a wild trip. I reinstalled various versions of Armbian on the sd card, but it would not want to boot at all. I could get it installed on a USB, and boot, but then my sdcard wouldn't be accessible at the same time. I installed Opi and reflashed mtdblock0 with the latest U-Boot SPL 2025.04 (Apr 02 2024 - 10:58:58 +0000)
Then I installed Armbian Bookworm 25.8.1 (6.1 kernel) on the sdcard, and it finally booted. I think I will hang out on this version for a while.