You must have spent a lot of time into this, thank you so very much 🙏

With a bit of persuasion I managed to disassemble it without breaking it. I desoldered U1 and I can confirm that pin 2 is GND. Also, here are better pictures taken with a magnifying glass. Note that pin 1 and 3 were shorted to pin 2, but it didn’t make sense to me, so I assumed they bridged due to the thermal shock when the component burned, so I scraped around them.

And here’s a link to AliExpress.

I guess there is no easy way to bypass it then, it would probably cheaper to buy a new device than to buy a replacement IC. Also, I guess now I will have to upload a clean version of the corrected schematic, I owe this to you and the other great people that replied.