I’m having similar issues. The IotaWatt ran fine for a long time then the SD card died. I tried prepping a new SD card (tried a 32gig and 2gig) and was having similar issues as the OP. It would not get passed the garbled boot message. It would boot fine with the SD card removed.
I measured D8 and had 12k, so I added in the 10k in parallel as the OP.
The unit now boots fine with the SD card but gets stuck:
I’m using the latest code from the Git page for the SD card, default config.txt. The log shows exactly the same thing as the screen grab. Stuck at HTTP server started, solid red LED, nothing else.
Ideas?
P.S. It looks like I have the same board rev and ESP as the OP.