Rob Douglas ran out the clock:
My preview trial of 2025 was evaluation version, and if you let that run past 180 days your SQL instance just will not start. I had an old Azure VM that I fired up to grab some code from a SQL Agent job I had been playing with and hit exactly this problem. Here’s the workaround:
Click through for the process. Fortunately, Rob doesn’t stop at how to get the instance up again, but continues into installing a non-evaluation version.