Bricked PBP after writing image to eMMC?

[electriccrowbar]

...
PS Soft bricking through bad images in either eMMC or SPI are pretty obvious... the power LED doesn't come on.

I'm sorry but I don't see this is a positive at all.
It gives no information to the user about a failure. If anything it misdirects them into thinking it's a hardware failure because the machine doesn't visibly power on and is entirely unresponsive.

I had this happen when my emmc got corrupted and thought the machine died on me until I attached a serial monitor.

I don't know uboot at all but I think ideally it would somehow indicate as early as possible that it's running. Less display drivers perhaps setting the power led to amber as early as it can and letting the linux kernel switch it to green would be a solution.