you can enable Seedvault to at least have a quicker recovery on a fresh+empty userdata when things go south - [HOWTO] use Seedvault early to understand Android backup - in the thread is a GUI way too.
I’m not sure my initial suggestion was good - If the boot from a 1.3 slot made it to the /e/ logo, then I think it’s not failing due to the boot/recovery image but some userdata “state”. If you had adb debug enabled while on 0.23 you could see logoutput then.