Firewall stop / LAN zone removal cuts access to the router

I’m not sure about it but it could be that the routing from the LAN switch to the CPU ports is done by via iptables:

You could also try to use iptables-save to store the current iptables rules and then remove a single rule, restore with iptables-restore until you have a minimal iptable that only contains basic rules and then try to implement that in nftables.