I get that you are uncertain about version number and build type for your friends phone …
In advising your friend you might look together at the published ROMs (below) to find your start point, and whether what was performed was an Android version upgrade; and was it on stable or dev.
- https://images.ecloud.global/stable/herolte/ ← stable
- https://images.ecloud.global/dev/herolte/ ← dev
a) If the phone was on stable there was a slightly complex Upgrade path notified here Week 08 2024: Development and Testing Updates - #9 regarding the OTA Upgrade that would have been offered. Also special release note here https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/os/releases/-/releases/v1.17.1-q.
b) Later edit. This question is about the OTA system updater, so no OTA Android version upgrade should have been available for a dev build. (If the phone was on the dev build, was an Android version Upgrade involved ? This would have required Format data. Fail to format data in this case might have caused some corruption which might cause PIN failure.)