Author here - thanks for the kind words! Both the moments I first saw the Apple logo rendered correctly (rendered by the bootloader) and the first time the Home Screen loaded were epic milestones indeed!

I treated this mostly as a side project but reverse engineering has always been a huge passion of me. However, I managed to combine some aspects of reverse engineering into my research work I've done in Delft, most notably by reverse engineering mobile banking APIs (https://devos50.github.io/assets/pdf/iom.pdf) and by deobfuscating strings in obfuscated Android APKs (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612.pdf).