this actually was a bug. the text (and pixart) in the tidbyt is supposed to be yellow but there is a mismatch between colors vindicated - if it was yellow (RG) it was now purple (BR) because somehow RGB in software is BRG IRL my second (repaired) unit will match

it's a hardware bug! the panel inside the first tidbyt has a different pinout than the standard and Tidbyt corrects it in stock firmware but not hdk the second tidbyt has standard pinout and is corrected which makes it fail