iphone 15 pro max esim hardware failure when traveling overseas

Have an iPhone 15 pro max with ATT esim from US, took it with me while traveling in Thailand.

a few days ago the esim started giving error and showing “requires update to use cellular” in settings. Later wifi gave up and won’t show any available hotspot/router around to connect to. And then on/off switch also gray out. Tried everything including restore/upgrade to 17.2.1 IOS, delete contents and resetting to factory setting, and now it won’t activate because it won’t connect wifi or it will show the following screenand activation with my new MacBook Air (latest MacOS) kept timing out. Took it to an Apple authorized repair shop locally

, they ran some tests and diagnoses and then told me there are hardware failure but can’t fix because of local consumer laws, contacted Apple support and 2 hours talking to several agent yield no progress.

I brought my old iPhone 13 with me, had this been a physical sim like before I just simply pop in the card and carry on until I get back to US and have the 15 fixed, now I have to get the esim transferred so I can keep getting 2FA texts to my cell but guess what, every operation over the phone they need to authorize by either sending a PIN to my cell (which is my dead phone) or having me physically show up in an ATT store. I also read online that new sim activation overseas is not possible because the activation requires cell tower (info to be verified)

sharing here in case somebody has some answers and nobody ran into this like me.

also this made me seriously reconsidering of using the esim only iPhone, even if it means moving to android after 16 years since the first iPhone