Thanks, that gives me hope - my SO bricked their Thinkpad by forcibly powering it off in the midst of the firmware upgrade of all things. Don't ask.

I was looking for the flashing hardware around here, but i should probably peek on AliExpress :)

A CH341A-based programmer with the accessories ("chip clip" cables and adapters) is available on AE for cheap (~$10) and will work to read/write the main BIOS.

If you need to recover the EC, then I believe anything that can work as a generic JTAG device, like an FX2LP dongle (~$5 or less, and useful for other things like a logic analyser) will also be needed.