had previously tried flashing with raspi imager and balena. got the official charger, didn’t work.
got another pi.
tried the misc flash that changed boot order, as that was the most common troubleshooting suggestion that i came across.
read on some forum that rufus helped them. used it to flash the raspi trixie image, set max_current_enable=1 in config.txt and it worked! somehow fixed the display resolution as well.