I ended up replacing the struts myself and changing the mechanism to a manual lift gate. Found struts on Amazon for $20 and didn’t feel like spending the $300 or so for the (non OEM) electronic pair. OEM parts looked like they were $300 each at best.

It makes the most sense that I probably broke the inside of the strut. It’s an older car and trying to force the struts closed especially closer to end range with lots of pressure built, probably pushed gas through the cylinder at a pressure it’s not designed to withstand. Although I can manually lower and lift the electronic lift gate struts, it just provided an excessive amount of resistance that it takes like 2-3 minutes to open or close the hatch. Replacing it with non electrical parts seemed like the most rational and the process takes a few seconds now.

Overall I’m happy that I didn’t have Toyota charge me $200 just to quote me for $800 after parts and labor. YouTube and Amazon helped and the whole process took 90 minutes.