I've use a small proto pcb, soldered a female header along with a SMT to DIP adaptor where I soldered the SPI-NOR flash, connect SPI signals to header.
Then, I've compile a Armbian image with user-patch for U-Boot Pine64 DTS, along with an DT overlay for the kernel that provide MTD partition.
To push U-Boot to the flash, I've used "flashcp" from "mtd-utils" package to /dev/mtd0 partition.