Recently, I turned my phone on, and it said the following message with a red triangle:
"Your device is corrupt. It can’t be trusted and may not work properly."
I assumed this was because of a VoLTE patch I did a while ago (This was effectively required since my provider does not allow any phone calls or sending/receiving SMS without it, and there's no way around it), which required me to root the phone and keep the bootloader unlocked, combined with some updates over time.
Phone did not boot, and I simply reinstalled the OS without the patch for now. Understandably, this is not within the scope of what the developer would fix against.
However, this raised a question: If this happened with locked bootloader and could not be unlocked due to OEM lock, would this mean that the phone would be bricked completely, with no chance of ever using it again, even if the integrity of the data on it didn't matter? Would this also mean that locking OEM is a bad idea in terms of functionality, if you are not particularly interested in protecting yourself against something as severe as targeted surveillance?