Yes, it was only after grub that the drivers were loaded and the kernel presumably panicked or at least nothing was displayed. Not sure if that is what you mean by bricked the entire workstation. If something broke before the kernel is loaded I doubt it was because of the drivers.
If you want to keep your current Debian installation alive you can try to chroot into it from a live usb.
Sorry if this is completely obvious to you but I really don't know what to expect based on your description.
Having looked at your other comments and the post you linked I too am intimidated. It looks as though you have access to your boot menu and bios though. I don't know what the upsides of secure boot are but I never turned it on on my current desktop PC. Maybe disabling it could help?
The image itself also doesn't quite match (at least based on the screenshot provided to us).
The colours shown on my screen are:
#B00B69
#A65EAB
#1D1BCB
Yes. I left a USB stick with a Linux installer on the table when they tried to upgrade to Windows 11. The upgrade failed and they instead upgraded to Linux without even needing to ask for help :>
I was not aware of any speech recognition tools that I have used that did not use machine learning. It's been around for quite some time (>20 years). The Wikipedia page lists some systems from before the 1980s that didn't use machine learning though I'm unsure whether those were ever used.
😊