I just ran into the same issue on a FriendlyARM RK3588. Wanted to swap it out with FriendlyWRT to turn it into a router, but now only Armbian SD cards boot. Even after a vendor supported 'factory reset' process via USB.
While it may not be intended to be a lock down and just due to poor testing/planning/silo effect, this is really uncool and should either be fixed or a better way to back out than having to manually pull pieces out and DD them over..