Have you verified where your board is stuck in your first scenario with openocd + arm-none-eabi-gdb? I wrote a tutorial here with which you can setup debugging in eclipse without needing PIO Plus. (Debugging STM32 and ESP32 targets in an IDE)
Have you verified where your board is stuck in your first scenario with openocd + arm-none-eabi-gdb? I wrote a tutorial here with which you can setup debugging in eclipse without needing PIO Plus. (Debugging STM32 and ESP32 targets in an IDE)