It looks like some kind of driver issue, not an intentional lockout.
To corroborate this, while I don’t have personal experience running Linux on T2 devices, I do know it’s possible to build xnu from source and boot the resulting unsigned kernel (in “No Security” mode) without the disk disappearing.
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Judging by this post:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/479544
It looks like some kind of driver issue, not an intentional lockout.
To corroborate this, while I don’t have personal experience running Linux on T2 devices, I do know it’s possible to build xnu from source and boot the resulting unsigned kernel (in “No Security” mode) without the disk disappearing.