tl,dr; an alternative solution was letting the battery drain so far it will force the device to go fully off.
I hate it when someone posts an issue and not the resolution, so consider this my long due follow-up 
The kind folks at Seeedstudio couldn’t fix the issue at the time (after extensive remote debugging) so they opened my T1000 to diagnose and create the solution you can now find in the wiki.
One of my other trackers had the similar issue after trying to charge with a shitty solar panel. I let it drain the battery for a few weeks and it came back to life. Flashed the current firmware and it works with my old settings 