From my understanding, if it happens once, it's a crash, if it keeps rebooting it's a brick. If it can be recovered it's a soft-brick, otherwise it's a hard-brick.

The thing is there is always more levels of bricked. Usually people refer to bricked as being unrecoverable through the usb flashing methods but there is usually a way to open up the device and flash the nand chip back to a working state. So its bricked in the perspective of a user but not for someone with electronics experience.

Another commenter agrees with you, writing:

> it soft-bricked their phones (ie. they had to factory reset their device)

But the whole point of coming up with the word "brick" was to describe the set of scenarios where even things like factory reset won't work. This is "literally" all over again.

But even with a hard brick (where it's "literally a brick"), you can sometimes bring it back to life by opening the device and swapping a component or soldering something.

I like soft vs hard brick, because it connects to software and hardware. With a soft brick, the device is basically a brick until you reset the software. With a hard brick, it requires potentially a hardware fix.