How to do a Nandroid backup without TWRP?

What happens, or how does it “break”?
I’m just trying to understand, since I don’t have the device … According to the device-specific install guide the bootloader is unlocked, according to the device-specific TWRP documentation TWRP simply gets flashed to the recovery partition … Looks fairly unobtrusive on paper.

I’m not aware of anything else which can do this.

If you are familiar with ADB and if your /e/OS build allows you to enable Rooted Debugging in the Developer options, you can run adb root and then theoretically pull everything in the Android directory tree over to the computer, most importantly the whole /data directory.
See also … https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/tools-zips-scripts-android-backup-and-restore-tools-multiple-devices-platforms.4016617/