It is the sort of nonsense we have to put up with when people start abusing a well-established term to get attention rather than to convey information -- though, in this case, it seems some machines really have been bricked.

It's somewhat common in the custom Android ROM community, where there are different levels of "brick".

To be sure, a soft brick is a pile of clay or mud, not a brick at all. It has neither the form or function of a brick, and therefore is the perfect analogy to this vociferous misnomer.