I bought a Home Assistant Yellow from the Home Assistant people so it would just work. It came with an old software version and demanded an update. 9.x to 10.x went fine. It demanded another update. 10.x to 11.0 and it’s bricked. No HTTP. No SSH. No factory reset.
This is disappointing. At least I didn’t even have a chance to set anything up, so things work just as well with it dead.
I had to reimage through serial/USB then the Raspi OS properly downloaded the current image. Thanks for the links getting me in the right neighborhood.
Anytime! Hopefully this is a resource for future users.