The cookie without chocolate is a classic, the variant with chocolate is only a 3 or 4 years old and likely always has been like this. So not shrinkflation or enshittification, just the way this product has always been.
Imo buy it without chocolate and eat it together with coffee or tea for the best result.
That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don’t have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.
One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn’t have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.
You could still send an email or fill in their contact form. It’s quickly done and the worst that could happen, is nothing.