That is unfortunately a common thing from level 1 support personel (no offence):

1) They dont answer your question.

2) If you ask multiple questions in the same case only one of the questions might be answered.

3) They try to point out something unrelevant to your case in order to not answer your question.

4) The case is then closed without actually resolving the issue you reported.

So you end up having to file 2-3 (or more) caseid's before the issue is handled correctly. The obvious reason for this is that the level 1 person will get a better statistics "ooh look at me, I solved 150 cases this week" where the true number is that it was just about 30 unique cases and not 150...

In your case to make mikec_intel happy, remove RAM from your NUC - what happens now?

If it still dead with no beeps or blinking leds in a specific order (to notify you that no RAM was detected) then its NOT a RAM related issue but rather a bad engineered NUC (given that you put it to sleep and now you cant make it to wake up no matter what).

The "bricked on sleep" is a know fault/error of NUC's and a computer should NEVER be bricked due to if the sleep mode occured async or sync. That is if it gets into some kind of lock you should then be able to remove external power, wait a few seconds and then boot the device as from a regular cold boot. Or as in the old days - long press on the power button to make the device to fully perform a cold reboot no matter of previous state.

The whole "remove bios battery and clear bios settings" is just as bad as it can get - specially when the moron who designed on placing the battery connector on the opposite side of the motherboard should be punished (if I need to remove the bios battery on my D54250WYK I need to completely disassemble the unit in order to get to the battery connector in order to disconnect it (and then reconnect it)). Here is a video of this in case you dont remember https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EPZQUaJozk Intel NUC D54250WYK - Motherboard and cooler removal - YouTube

Intel NUC are really beautiful but at the same time it seems like Intel had some junior engineers involved in both design and architecture of these devices along with lacking quality assurance.

The good thing is that Intel is fixing these issues (for example you can order through support the new SATA daughterboard if you have that broken one or by BIOS update to (hopefully) fix the "bricked on sleep" even if it took about a year or so before this was resolved from Intels side) but it takes time for us the customers during which customers are being negatively affected by the bugs found.

Currently:

1) Bad design of the SATA daughterboards which means that they must be replaced in order to fully function with SATA devices.

2) Something is broken with the external PSU (or the design of the power inlet in the NUC) making bass peaks and noise coming out of the speaker connector (heard during reboots and cold boots, will be bad to your ears if you had too large volume and the NUC connected to an amplifier and you didnt prepare for that bass peak to come).

3) "Bricked on sleep" - putting a NUC to sleep when using Linux will really put your NUC to sleep (its dead until you remove the BIOS battery and clear its BIOS settings).

That last case above might be fixed with v0038 BIOS update for the D54250WYK but it seems like other NUC models are affected too and the customers, for obvious reasons, are not too happy to verify this on their own if their current BIOS is fixed or not.