Hi! first forum post. I am a hardware enthusiast but I haven't got much experience yet. I am a programmer professionally and I do a lot of low level stuff, especially at home. So I come to electronics from the software perspective, so in this world I am pretty noob still 
I did not see this particular problem addressed but if it is here, please link it to me.
I have been playing around with an atmega328p on a breadboard. Internal 8mhz clock, dug up the bread board 8mhz bootloader, arduino:avr:atmega328bb is the fbqn. I use arduino-cli which is working fine for me, I program the arduino due with it as well on my rpi4 using per1234's awesome package. (I am sure the IDE is good and convenient but I am not interested).
I burned the bootloader using an arduino uno with the ArduinoISP sketch, using the arduinoasisp programmer option. Worked like a charm and everything was smooth and a stroll through the land of fantastic and sweet rainbows, heart arrows flying around all over the place etc.
Then I wanted to USB-to-TTL and had this ch340 module. There were no problems with it, I managed to upload a sketch to the uno board but never to the bread board. I tried a million settings, read articles like a maniac I was in this forum reading for hours but nothing worked. More and more desperate configurations and tired minded I inverted the power lines and shorted the hell out of the chip. It got warm but no magic smoke. When it cooled down I tried burning the bootloader again, I tried uploading sketches using the arduino as isp again, but the signature read all zeroes.
Then I came across this video: YOUTUBE VIDEO where he shows you how to manually read and write to avr chips. I though this will let me know if the chip is broken or just bricked.
I did follow the steps in there, using the complete atmega328p datasheet. this one: DATA SHEET
but when I read the addresses 0, 1 and 2 using the data pins I only get 0x1f (0001 1111). I should get 0x1e 0x95 0x0f.
The question:
This should mean I have destroyed the chip instead of it just being bricked, right?