It sounds like when you removed the efi partition it probably wiped the i/o info that allowed the drive to connect to the computer. Since it was operating fine until you removed that partition. The efi partition does hold important information for the ssd to be able to operate.
I’m not that tech savvy with ssd’s but logically there has to be something that allows the ssd to know to connect to the computer. When you think bout it pen drives have a partition you cannot delete for this reason after you format them.
Based on This info it seems you have rendered that ssd completely unusable.
I honestly don’t know, but I did find this if you are working on windows or Mac. Warning this is probably. NOT free software.
https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/external-hard-drive-not-initialized.html