I did try tuning the watchdog thresholds/gain too but never had much luck. I read a few places that there might have been problems with some of the early AS3935 chips (but could never find too much info) and I know there were problems with some of the breakout boards on Aliexpress having the wrong capacitors on the board (which was another thing I tested/fixed). The one thing I never tried was all my boards are fairly old so they might have whatever the original hardware flaw is and maybe newer ones work as intended.

I've been mighty tempted to try again with a newer one as I really want to build a compact portable lightning sensor linked to Meshtastic but I dread going through the whole ordeal again.