M1 MBP stuck entering recovery mode

I have to capitulate, my attempts went nowhere and what you described would be a much easier way to resolve this. The only “discovery” I’ve made that if the first recovery partition is corrupted you can boot into a fall back one, by double-pressing and holding the power button and then continuing as usual. This worked for me and I erased my Mac this way. (It looks like it stores the factory Monterey recovery partition) Curiously after erasing I was able to boot into my Ventura usb installer, so… perhaps something happened during the upgrade to Ventura?

Well that's not good... Sounds like your Recovery partitions are messed up. How long did you let it sit apparently frozen?

This is potentially destructive so step one would be to make a backup of the M1 Mac via Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner to an external disk before you do anything else.

Do you have access to a second Apple Mac computer? If you do, you can install Apple Configurator on the second Mac and using a Thunderbolt 3/4 USB-C cable you can potentially perform a revive or restore operation on the M1 Mac. Basically, due to the hardware security you need to boot strap the broken M1 Mac from another Mac by grabbing the recovery partitions (revive) or the entire OS (restore) from scratch, downloading from Apple to the 2nd Mac which will then allow you to reload the broken M1 Mac over the Thunderbolt data cable.

If you don't have access to a second Mac you can always book a Genius appointment at an Apple Store to bring it in and they can fix it.

Revive or restore a Mac with Apple silicon using Apple Configurator - Apple Support

I have the same problem on my MacBook Air M1. I've tried to create a bootable installer for Ventura (I can still boot into macOS), but with no luck. The system still freezes, which is weird since this looks like a hardware problem and not a software one? I'll try to boot from my backup but... it doesn't look great.

Apple Silicon Macs (M1 / M2) are not like Intel Macs. You cannot boot from an external disk unless the internal disk is working and contains special system volumes. Mainly the preboot volume. You cannot just wipe the internal disk and perform a clean install. You can completely brick the Mac doing that.

Sounds like the Recovery volume is broken or replaced by something not quite compatible.

The correct way to reset things to factory is to navigate to System Settings -> General -> Transfer or Reset -> Erase All Content and Settings. It works exactly like an iPhone / iPad.

However, if you've messed things up and you need to perform a hard reset to factory. Then just like an iPhone you need to use Apple Configurator on a second Mac. Putting the broken Mac into DFU mode and connect it to the second working Mac with Thunderbolt USB-C cable. Then you use Apple Configurator to download the OS and restore it to the broken Mac which will wipe the disk and start from scratch. There are two options, Revive and Restore. Revive will fix a Mac that won't boot while Restore is a full hard reset to factory. By default Apple Configurator will only give you the latest macOS version.

[Edited by Moderator]