Loved my Nexus 7. Still have it and it works, although it was rendered completely unusable through a software update about 6 years ago (jellybean?)
Sadly the Samsung Tab A 10.1 that came later also suffered a huge performance drop (like many seconds to open the keyboard) and there's no supported Lineage for it, so it'll probably just go in a drawer and be forgotten.
Another family member got an iPad mini around the time I got my Nexus, and that's still going.
I thought the factory image install scripts rewrote the partition table, so even if you screw it up it should come back as long as you still have fastboot? Or maybe I'm thinking of another model.