A couple years ago on Reddit I saw a story where a dude working IT support had to drive to a remote office or replace a workstation that wouldn’t boot. When he got there the lady whose desk it was had some shitty USB fan or maybe an led Christmas tree plugged into one of the USB ports. He unplugged that and the pc booted fine.

I think this is likely related to USB cables as power cables and USB ports/voltages.

I have seen a lamp completely fry a MacBook. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar cause a boot loop.