Factory reset isn’t the end of the world, I did it to my gen2 Chromecast when the outage first happened and managed to get it connected again by rolling my phone’s date back and finishing the setup.

This article was super helpful and helped temporarily restore casting functionality from my phone. https://mensfeld.pl/2025/03/bringing-your-chromecast-back/

I imagine it’s so no one would be willing to come to our aid as he destroys the country.