@crispyoz, @matiaslao: sorry for not responding. Unfortunately this forum does not have an RSS feed, so I sometimes forget checking regularily.
Anyway, I hope your reset issue could be sorted out in the meantime.
If I remember the difference between v23.5 and older versions correctly, the broken-flash-reset in the device tree has become a standard feature of the mtd/spi-nor subsystem, while before the workaround was a specific patch with no DT option, and implemented differenty.
In the new driver (if I am reading drivers/mtd/spi-nor/core.c correctly), the chip is kept in 4-byte mode most of the time, and only reverted to 3-byte when the device is removed or a shutdown occurs.
echo c >> /proc/sysrq-trigger crashes the kernel immediately, so the spi-nor driver will not get a chance to switch back to 3-byte and the reboot will fail.
The old workaround probably switched forth and back between 4-byte and 3-byte for every flash access, so a HW reset or kernel crash while no flash access was actually ongoing was fine.