Thanks Fox. Awesome news! 
It is possible that the drive got “locked”. I’ve read about (and seen) it happen - primarily on sata mech drives though. I came across it when I was searching for how to clear out a drive, burn it in, and test for errors before deployment.
Maybe something to explore. As I recall there was a whole section over on the Arch wiki and the Red Hat docs. Especially if you do have another machine to experiment with.