As an atheist, I ask for prayers that the backup's good.
E: Your solidarity has worked. The backup is good and not too old. Note for myself and you - install your OS on a snapshotting filesystem so that live backups are possible.
Not the heatsink in the picture. The motherboard's M2 heatsinks:
Especially the bottom one. It leaves no space for installing an NVMe with a stock heatsink. To remove it, it requires access to the rear of the board, which now has this big ass metal backplate covering it. So one has to remove the whole backplate to access the screws holding the bottom M2 heatsinks. Only then they can be removed and a factory-heatsinked SSD installed. I thought that would've been more work, and I didn't want to modify a board I have not tested yet that could need to be RMAd if defective.
The lessons for me are:
- Always keep a recent system backup
- Don't remove stock NVMe heatsinks I did not install myself - they could be glued
- If stuck with such SSDs, mod the motherboard after testing it