Thus, perhaps "loafed" as in something brick-like, but which may also be soft. And a "loafed" device, being idle, would be loafing.

You could say the device was pillowed. :D Although given the typical behaviour of old phone batteries, I guess that’s a little ambiguous.

A soft brick would be a brick before being fired in an oven, no?

So maybe the term shouldn't be 'soft brick' but rather 'muddied'.

"That updated muddied my device, I had to clean it up with a restore"

I appreciate the sentiment but I don't see that catching on. I think a variant of bricked makes sense as it basically means you can't use the device until you can figure out how to fix it. Which the "muddied" analogy doesn't really fit - it's usually possible to use muddy things if not necessarily pleasant.

"fix it" was the definition of the the old usage of brick though, with the "fix it" generally meant a hardware fix, like replaced components. if the fix is reinstalling software, then that means it's still a completely functional piece of hardware. there's nothing wrong with it. you don't say your car is broken because someone who can't drive sits in the driver seat! get off my lawn!

I remember this being referred to as "the OS needs to be reinstalled", a trivial thing that nobody bothered to give a name to, because it was frequent and non-consequential.