Sadly Mikrotik choose to disable UART pins completely so they are useless (there is no routerboot menu nor you can use them from ROS).
But they work perfectly fine if OpenWRT is flashed to the device... it's completely software limitation.... for no reason. Stupid!
As for JTAG, I haven't had any luck with OpenOCD, but maybe there is some way to do it. But for boards with SPI memory it's easier to just use test clip (or desolder it) and reprogram it directly as it's just 8 pin chip.
But for big NAND chips it's far more difficult, especially on rb9xx boards with BGA chips
But whatever you do, please first contact support and make sure they understand how much they screwed up. Only way for things to improve in the future is if enough customers complain.
Talking here on forum is good to warn other users, but Mikrotik just doesn't care. You can search for other topics with keywords like "brick" "bootloop"... not a single reply from anyone from Mikrotik.