Another is that the high humidity has resulted in damage to the chip in your aftermarket cartridge.
Did you try replacing it with another aftermarket? If you did, and that one also failed, then that would make a stronger case for lock-out firmware.
Another possibility is that (since the protocol for communicating with the cartridge is almost certainly undocumented) the aftermarket cartridge manufacturer didn’t reverse-engineer it 100% correctly, and a firmware update in the printer is now having problems with it.
Unfortunately, without a lot more technical information than we’re likely to get, it is impossible to know for certain.