Factory reset Macbook Air that was running Monterey, now I can't install any OS

I have an early 2015 Macbook Air that was previously running Monterey without issue. However, it was starting to run hot and slow down a little. Since I do a lot of photo editing on it while I'm traveling for work, I decided to factory reset it to see of that would help clean things up.

I first re-installed El Capitan, then High Sierra, then Catalina, but I couldn't install anything higher than that. I kept getting errors, or it would just freeze (left it running over night with no progress.)

I erased the drive once more to start over and now I can't install any OS without it failing. The errors I get bounce between "An error occurred while extracting files from the Essentials.pkg" and "Can't find boardID, chipID"

I've used recovery, internet recovery, and bootable installer (both thumb and ssd.) I tried running an OS off an external ssd (Samsung T5), downloading an OS, and installing it to the internal drive with no luck. I don't have any issue installing and running OS on the Samsung T5, so it's not the installers.

Additionally, I can't boot to my internal drive and it doesn't register as a startup disk (because there's no OS?), and it ejects or disconnects every time I try to install OS. I don't understand why - it can be seen in Disk Utility, no errors when I fun first-aid, it can be written to, and Apple Diagnostics came back OK as well. (it's the original drive that came with the laptop.)

I've been all over the internet and Apple Community looking for answers and I'm still stuck. Obviously it's out of warranty, and I'm trying to avoid having to get to take it in if possible.

So my question is, is this a software/configuration issue, and can I fix it?

Or possibly a hardware issue? Can an OS install kill a drive? I'm guessing if it's hardware, I won't know until I start swapping things out, since diagnostics isn't giving me anything?