You are the MAN! You managed to reproduce the problem that NW Digital denies exits and have a work around!
All the people that say you do not need the dtoverlay= line in config.txt probably have new cards with the correct EEPROM. I have one of the first cards and removing the dtoverlay= line breaks the soundcard. Putting it back fixes it. Maybe one of the folks at NW Digital can put in the dtdebug=1 line then boot and see what comes back in sudo vcdbg log msg command. Maybe after the Pacific Northwest Summer Gathering there might be either a fix to the driver module or they might send out a way to update the EEPROM on the card.
One other note - the DRAWS lines need to be inserted in the config.txt before the [pi4] and [all] stuff in the config file.
This has been tested on new images for Buster for both Pi3 and Pi4 after doing the sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade.
I do like the suggestion to comment out the dtparam=audio=on from Mike.
