Why didn't it work?

I've been wondering why my SDK hacking attempts did work so poorly. But, after thinking a bit about it, it should have been obvious from the start:

Synchronization functions heavily depend on the scheduler!

I wanted my bare-metal main to behave like an ordinary FreeRTOS task, yet a lot of things an ordinary task is expected to do (like waiting) is a feature from the scheduler. But, we explicitly don't want the scheduler to be running, so we can't expect these things to work. From the FreeRTOS point of view, it's a bit like an interrupt wants to wait for a mutex (which is forbidden as far as i know).

Possible solutions

Sadly, there isn't much that can be done about that without digging deep into FreeRTOS and either teaching the synchronization functions to busy-wait while running on the second core or using a modified scheduler for the second core that only handles synchronization stuff but leaves the task alone otherwise.

Thou shall not cache!

I thought the SDK hacking approach is at least good for having the cache working and thus being able to execute code from flash. Turns out, it's not that simple. The cache loading functions also rely on the synchronization of  FreeRTOS to prevent issues from both cores trying to access the SPI flash at the same time. It also prevents the other core from accessing the cache while it's being updated.

Since as stated above the synchronization is not working, also cache loads are not possible for now.