Does that mean this system is completely unusable now?

Have you tried physically pulling the power cable from the device and waiting at least a few seconds before plugging it back in?

I'm not sure how to go about resolving this one to be honest with you, Apollo Lake is not a platform that we focus on anymore, we are not testing it at all at this point. A few pointers still, based on inspection of the launch script you attached in the first email:
- You can remove the "   --pm_notify_channel ioc \" line, you don't have the ioc device on the NUC
- I'm curious about this virtio-blk that is mapped to /mnt, what's the purpose of this?

Thanks,
Geoffroy