If the dongle was never powered on when the meter was turned on, it should not be the issue. a solder bridge or damaged component is still more likely.
1. measure resistance between voltage rails and GND.
2. check every pair of adjacent pins (near reworked areas) for shorts, with a multimeter.
3. Note everywhere you see flux reside. Clean the flux residue thoroughly then look at all the solder joins with a microscope or cheap 30-40x loupe. The resistors by the flat printed cable look dodgy from the image, for example.
4. check whether any chip pins have lifted from their pad while you were applying heat.
Visual inspection can uncover obvious solder bridges, but they also play hide-and-seek with you. Measuring continuity with a multi-meter is more ***-proof. thorough cleaning is crucial since the flux goop can hide defects.
Before anything else, perform all these steps and thoroughly. Until you do, there's no point in suggesting next steps for general troubleshooting.
> As far as flashing goes, nobody seems to have flagged anything wrong with that end of it, so I will assume the
> flash is good and that something else has gone south or the wires are affecting the circuit.
It's up to you, but your patched firmware is an unknown you can eliminate. If your firmware is the issue, you'll be chasing ghosts forever. If you can't find an electrical issue, I strongly recommend you remove any modded firmware from the equation, since that is something you know changed since the multimeter was functional. That makes it a far more likely cause than a damaged chip. And If you remove the chip, that's also a chance to test it out-of-circuit (you can remount it on a chip blue-pill board, for example).
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