Trial of Sekhemas zone and ascendancy unavailable (BRICKED CHARACTERS)

IMPORTANT NOTE:
This is a different issue from the high priority known issue in cruel act 2.

THE ISSUE:
If you perform a certain action (or rather inaction) in normal act 2, your character becomes bricked and the following happens:
- The character is prevented from doing trials of sekhemas and gaining ascendancies from the trials of sekhemas for the remainder of the character's lifespan.
- You cannot use waypoints/desert map to travel to the trials of sekhemas for the rest of the character's lifespan, as it just won't show up on the map at all.
- You can also not teleport to any party members inside the trials of sekhemas zone.

HOW TO REPLICATE:
If you kill Balbala the Traitor and you don't pick up the Djinn Barya green quest item, and then you leave the instance until the instance resets and the item drop disappears, you are stuck on the quest Ascent to Power: 'Return to the Ardura Caravan and speak to Zarka.'
You cannot interact with Zarka however, and you are stuck without the ability to access the trials of sekhemas zone, no matter what you try.

If you kill Balbala the Traitor again in order to regain the green quest item Djinn Barya, the boss will never drop the required quest item again. This means the quest is bricked for the remainder of the character's lifespan. Normal Djinn Barya's you pick up after also won't be able to trigger the interaction with Zarka that is required to complete the quest.

SIDE NOTES:
I've seen plenty of other threads on the forums with people complaining about this issue, but no proper bug reports have been filed for this. It is also sometimes mixed up with reactions from people talking about the cruel act 2 known issue, while this issue is just as frustrating at the very least.

I'm also fairly certain that this quest being bricked affects the access to the currency exchange, that is then delayed to later acts.

Doing the trials of chaos still works.