Locked out of phone after soft reset

Complicated story, TLDR. Apple “genius” did a soft reset on wife’s iPhone 12 Pro. He warned that she would need to re-enable facial recog, but assured her nothing would be “lost.” After restarting several times, phone now just says “System - SIM locked”, can’t get past that. Click on that message, “Open” button appears. Click on that, it says “enter passcode, iPhone requires passcode after restarting”. She enters the passcode and it comes back with: “iPhone unavailable, try again in [some amount of time]” - where [some amount of time] initially said “1 minute”, next attempt it was 5 minutes, next was 30 minutes, then 1 hour…

She can’t get past this. The phone is now a paperweight.

Greatly complicating things: we are away from home, and just began a 3-week foreign trip (USA resident and phone, we’re now in Italy). So lots of resources we would ordinarily have are unavailable. And the phone is pretty important to her/us for many basic tasks.

My questions:

1. phone is asking for a passcode. She is entering the phone’s passcode (or what WAS its passcode before genius did a soft reset to try and resolve lack of internet connectivity via cellular).
2. Phone was restarted multiple times after soft reset, it never asked for a passcode then (3-5? times). Now it’s asking for but rejecting the correct passcode. Why?
3. How can she regain access?

Details:

This phone was never locked to any carrier, it was purchased unlocked.

The phone had a physical SIM card when we left home. Upon landing in Italy we bought an Italian (physical) SIM, installed it (swapped out the home SIM card), it seemed to be working. But we soon realized that although she could make/receive calls, but if not connected to WiFi she could SEND text messages but did not RECEIVE them. Really weird. Apple genius at an authorized reseller tried to help, tried a soft reset but that did not resolve her issues, he then suggested she install an e-SIM to see if she could use THAT for cellular data and text messages. That actually worked (I was surprised, it seemed crazy) but only for a couple hours, before the phone “locked” itself.

Now: Unhappy wife, mounting problems increasing hourly as she can’t pay bills, access employer email, nothing works and her phone is essentially a glass and metal brick now.

We are away for 3 weeks, so restoring from her last good backup at home is not an option (last sync to her desktop Mac was 2 months ago - no iCloud syncs). She’s clearly going thru withdrawal after just a few hours, I’m worried about how she is gonna survive 3 weeks. It is very revealing about how we all have become so over-dependent on phones that ultimately are beyond our control. She’s in Italy and can’t even take a picture or use the calculator, never mind checkin for a flight or respond to work emails/text messages.

How can she get past that “SIM locked” message?

I’ve thought about just removing the physical SIM but don’t want to make things worse. Ideas?

Thanks for any help.