I concluded the 6502 must have been damaged during soldering...

Strangely enough, I have seen this weird sequence of reads to $FFFE-FFFF, with some $0000 and $017F randomly appearing, on my very first attempt at moving a breadboard design to perfboard. After days of messing with it and not getting it to properly reset, I concluded the 6502 must have been damaged during soldering, pulled it from the board, put it back into a test rig -- only to see it reset perfectly. I think it may come from an electrical problem, maybe a short somewhere (though I measured no spurious continuity between pins), a brownout from the power supply or a signal path so bad that it distorted the clock beyond any recognition. I don't have an oscilloscope to check anyway.

The CPU was a modern WDC 65c02 from Mouser. Unfortunately I still have no idea what this problem came from. But hey, that's two of us, which makes it a known and documented failure mode, right?

Strangely enough, I have seen this weird sequence of reads to $FFFE-FFFF, with some $0000 and $017F randomly appearing, on my very first attempt at moving a breadboard design to perfboard.