Tiny chipped SMD part near the SoC on my Pi 5 - guess the component?

I had almost the same thing happen to a Pi 4 a while back, found a scorch-marked little component near the power section and spent way too long guessing what it was. What actually helped was checking continuity from each end to ground. One leg read dead short to the ground plane, which pointed to it being an ESD protection part rather than a bead or a resistor, since those usually fail open or drift, not short. If your dead board reads open both ways where that part sits, that tells you something different than a short would. On the repair side, I have replaced 0402 sized parts with a regular pencil iron and a fine tip. Two iron tips, one on each end of the part, slide it off once the solder flows, then tin the pads, drop the new part on with tweezers and reflow each end. Plenty of flux, that is the whole trick. The hard part is not the soldering, it is figuring out what the replacement actually is. I ended up pulling a donor part off a scrap board from a thrifted router because I could not identify the value from the markings, which are basically invisible at that size anyway.

Honestly though, with a dead board and no other symptoms to go on, I would check the obvious stuff first before the microscope work. Measure the 5V input pin and the outputs on the big power chip with a multimeter, see if anything is shorted. On mine the little component was collateral damage, the real fault was the power chip itself, and the board was not worth saving at that point.

I know the continuity trick gets mentioned, but I'd push back on chasing the part at all with one of these boards. I burned a whole weekend last year on a dead Pi 3 trying to suss out a burned component near the power section with a fine tip iron, and even after I fitted a replacement the board stayed just as dead. Turned out the failure had taken out something upstream that I had no way of finding, because unlike some boards there's no published schematic or board layout to work from. You're guessing in the dark. The other thing is that the dark topped part is very likely an inductor, and those usally only fail when something downstream drew way too much current. So even if you swap it and the board powers up, whatever killed it may still be sitting there waiting.

As for doing it by hand without hot air, on a board this dense it's a misery. My iron trick was to tin both pads, melt the joint with the component resting on top, and hope for the best. I bridged two pads next to it twice before I got it right. Honestly I'd just buy another board and keep the dead one as a donor for practice soldering. That's what mine became.

Total newcomer here so take this with a grain of salt, but I had a vaguely similar thing on a zero where a tiny part near the power section cracked and the board half worked, enough to get warm but nothing on screen. Never did figure out what it was, just gave up. Reading this thread makes me wonder if I should dig that board out and check the rails like the second reply said. One thing I'm still fuzzy on though, when you say measure the outputs on the big power chip, do you mean probing the little coils next to it or the pins on the chip itself? I've got a cheap multimeter and steady-ish hands but zero expirience probing boards this small.

Agree with the poster who said the little part is usually collateral damage. On mine, a Pi 4 that got zapped by a dodgy phone charger, the burnt bit next to the power chip was just the messenger. I pulled a replacement off a dead TV board, fitted it with my normal iron, and the Pi still refused to boot because the big chip itself was cooked. Swapping chargers or checking what was plugged in at the time might tell you more than the microscope will.