There were no bricked devices. You have to read those threads carefully. There were people who tried to go back to the earlier version, and the solution was to not do that, or to go back to the leaked version at the time.

On the other hand, there are excellent arguments for claiming that the non-leaked PR2.1 hurt a number of people. This would be misleading too, for certain reasons, but numerically many more people claimed to have struck disaster with the official version of PR1.2.