I'll add my 2 cents with my more recent findings.
Mind that I am using an Orange PI 5 Plus, your mileage might vary with other models.
I started booting the official Orange PI (Arch) distro to clear the SPI bootloader, as suggested by @Igor
sudo pacman -Syy
sudo pacman -S mtd-utils
sudo flash_erase /dev/mtd0
I've tried multiple flavours of the available downloads for Armbian, but I've found that all versions with kernel 6.12.58 would fail to load (the LED stays red, instead of flashing red & blue).
This includes both Debian trixie and Ubuntu noble, with their desktop and minimal editions.
Back in December 20204 @Igor V described similar boot issues that got resolved with kernel 6.1.75, the one that was highlighted in green at the time.
So that led me to try with kernel 6.1.115 instead, and that has worked just fine.
Not sure if this is an issue introduced with the newer kernel, or whether it's to be expected as it has not been officially stabilised yet.
Anyway, I thought I'd share in case this can help others in the future.
