"I haven't tried updating the Thinkpad BIOS because I've had bad luck with Lenovo's BIOS updater in the past, bricking one machine."
FYI, I've probably done that 1000's of times across a wide range of models and never had it brick a laptop. I think you were either really, really unlucky or there was some underlying fault neither the hardware or whatever OS you were running the updater on. Ditto with HPs and Dells.
In realty, as a field engineer of many years, it's always been company policy to flash the BIOS/firmware whenever a system board is being replaced under warranty, whether that be server[*], desktop, laptop, printer etc. (ditto for other firmware[**] on the system). I've had exactly one that has bricked in 20+ years and that was a building power outage during the update process.
[*] But always check, when it's a server. The users may have a requirement for a specific BIOS revision although that's pretty rare these days.
[**] eg, Intel ME and AMD equivalent, laptop webcams, NVMe SSDs, laptop batteries(!!) etc.