Grounds in vertuo coffee after bearing replacement

My Nespresso Vertuo machine was increasingly loud while brewing coffee. I’ve had it for about seven years now and it’s brewed probably thousands of cups at this point. I looked up the problem and saw that it was a bearing issue and seemed easy enough to fix. I ordered a new bearing, took the machine apart, replaced the bearing, and put everything back together exactly as it had been before.

Now the machine brews whisper quiet, but the piercing mechanism seems to be faulty – it doesn’t pierce the pod correctly and is causing tons of grounds to be brewed into my cup. I’ve taken the machine apart again to figure out the issue, but everything looks correct. I’ve run multiple descaling and self cleaning cycles and I’m at a loss.

I’m about to trash the whole machine but wanted to ask here if there’s an obvious solution that I’m overlooking. Has anybody run into this and if so, how did you fix it?