Anyone successfully flashed Linux on VIM3L without bricking it?

No idea. I think Khadas should really urgently provide a micro-SD image for the VIM3L. This would alleviate the need for these unreliable tools because one would just have to use a regular “dd” or an equivalent on windows and there would be no such issue anymore.

Note that there is the krescue SD image which should work fine. I suppose it’s usable to manually flash the eMMC image. I found it mentioned in this thread here: VIM3L: booloader fail: DDR training error