PPDB22 - as far as determining for certain what’s wrong… I would say that we’re back at the point you brought up earlier. That is to say, can we determine whether the MCU is blank? We can. (We just can’t determine whether the MCU is programmed incorrectly.)
If you would like to do this, the first step is to get comfortable by following Hoop’s tutorial and flashing an ATtiny13A correctly. Hoop - Guide: how to flash a NANJG / Qlite driver with custom firmware
Once that’s out of the way, adjust the command for the ATtiny85 and for dumping rather than flashing. I believe that it would look something like this: The guide actually covers this and provides a command, so all that’s required is swapping “T13” for “ATTINY85”….
avrdude -p attiny85 -c usbasp -u -Uflash:r:flash-dump.hex:i -Ueeprom:r:eeprom-dump.hex:i -Ulfuse:r:lfuse-dump.hex:i -Uhfuse:r:hfuse-dump.hex:i