If you’re waiting for a steam deck to be available i have good news. The problem was that they used all of the locktite in the world on one of the screws on my steamdeck which made changing the ssd a PITA on mine, i ended up destroying that screw. I’m sure they’ll get more locktite abd begin shipping to you soon. I use arch btw.
Ill be getting mine later this week, and that screw issue is not what i wanted to hear.
If it helps, I took mine apart this last weekend with no issues whatsoever.
I also took my SSD out and replaced it without issue. Seems OP just got unlucky