I wrote a fair amount of assembly for my TI-83 and some assembly and C for my TI-89. I don’t remember it being possible to accidentally brick the calculators because if you messed up enough and froze everything, you just took the batteries out, opened up the case and popped out the little hearing-aid battery which reset everything.
I'm sure that would work - over the years since I learned much more about computers, and realized I needn't have worried so much.
My misconception came from an article I read at some point which described assembly/C (I think) programming as more risky, and I just took it at face value.
It was definitely annoying and if you didn’t have a screwdriver to get inside it was “bricked.”
The one thing I was never brave enough to do was overclock. Supposedly it was just unsoldering a capacitor which would do something like 3x the clock speed.
