Fresh image on sdcard will not boot

[motorious1]

Updated the firmware so I could boot off a USB3 raspbian OS and get faster I/O speeds than from the sdcard. Found an early release of ElementaryOS for pi4 and decided to try it out since I enjoy it so much on my laptop.

Startup shows the following errors:
[...]
start4.elf: is not compatible
This board requires newer software

$ rpi-eeprom-update
BCM2711 detected
VL805 firmware in bootloader EEPROM <<<< I believe this is the culprit but unable to figure out the solution.
Checking for updates in /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable
Use raspi-config to select either the default-production release or latest update.
BOOTLOADER: up-to-date
CURRENT: Thu 18 Mar 2021 08:54:11 AM UTC (1616057651)
LATEST: Thu 18 Mar 2021 08:54:11 AM UTC (1616057651)
RELEASE: stable

Tried:
Copying /boot/start4.elf from raspbian boot partition(that is working) to ElementaryOS Hera Pi4 boot partition. That did not work.

Can't seem to find any information on how to downgrade the firmware on the raspberry pi... I understand this is an unsupported version, but wanted to log the issue just in case there's a known workaround out there.

[pablo9009]

I have the same error
Raspberry pi is really terriable to start various types of images despise to adivce it of.
If not screen not compatiable than frecqancy to low than no enough memory than no support. So so so
Many problems