After many long months of learning and trial and error, the device boots PostmarketOS and is mostly functional as a simple linux device. What I haven't been able to verify is mobile connection and bluetooth seems to have issues still.
The touchscreen was and still is the biggest problem. I believe everything else comes down to device tree changes. The touchscreen, however, fails to return an f12 descriptor during startup, requiring a workaround to allow the driver to continue despite not receiving a descriptor from the hardware. There may be a long term fix for this and it might be getting a different display for my device as it is a after market display and could be the source of the issue.
For now, this may be satisfactory for me. Ideally, I'd like to obtain newer hardware to try this on. As of right now, I'm eyeballing any of the latest Oppo devices.