EA ACCOUNT HACKED. XBOX ACCOUNT UNLINKED. CANT RE-LINK XBOX ACCOUNT

Firstly, this is a very niche and complex problem so I will try my best to explain the nature of my current situation. this will be a long process but I want to explain it in depth of how I got here to get the best understanding of what my options are now.

I have had my xbox account for 13 years, I have played many games on it but the last 5 years I have spent most of my time playing EA's game apex legends, 2768 hours to be exact. over a thousand dollars spent on cosmetics and battles passes. 30K kills on a specific legend, you get the point. some how years ago my xbox account was linked to my friends EA account, I can only assume by logging into my xbox account on one of his EA games on his xbox. This ea account in question, the xbox account my friend use to play on and the email account originally linked to it haven't been used since 2014. There was a total of 3 xbox live accounts linked to this ea account, two were my friends, the sole creator of the EA account and mine. This has never been an issue for me as I could always just log in on my xbox and play Apex. With the new season 20 being released there is a flatline skin that is acquired by specific challenges being completed. One of them consisting of having to gift skins to friends through your EA account, for this you need Log in verification turned on. I contacted my friend for the details to log in to the email account linked to the ea account. After some effort he got into his email, reset the password and gave me the details. I used the code EA was sending to the Email and turned on verification. great on my way to unlocking the flatline skin. 4 days or so down the line I try to play apex on my xbox and its asking me to log in to my EA account to play, weird but I put in the details for my friends account as I now have them, the error message says the email address I entered isn't linked to an EA account. My friends email address had been hacked and they logged into the EA account and changed the password and email. they didnt change any of the log in details to the email address. I logged in through my friends xbox account linked to the EA account and see its been logged into from Hong Kong. luckily I took photos of the backup codes and after this I added an authenticator app and a secondary email, mine. I can't change the email from the hackers, back to the original as you need to wait 30 days. but I did change the password, still not secure as the hacker still has access to the email he liked to the account. This is where my issues starts, the hacker for whatever reason unlinked my 13 year xbox account. I did not know that all progression is linked to your EA account for ea games and not the xbox account. so when I couldn't log in to the ea account, I tried to play and apex puts you through the process of creating a new EA account and linking it to your xbox account on the actual game so you can play. I naively did the not understanding my progression was on the EA account. so now my xbox account is completely fresh. I have since unlinked it and It is currently not linked to any ea account. I found transcripts on the ea account of the hacker talking to EA help and getting my xbox account removed. eventually after days chatting to ea help I get them to change the email back to the original and my ea account is completely secure. keep in mind I was hacked through the email account and that has since has the password changed and 2FA turned on. All my personal accounts have different generated passwords and 2FA, my friend did not do this with the email. after gaining access to the EA account back I have been chatting to multiple EA help people trying to get my xbox account linked back. they have all said this is not possible and you can only ever have one platform account linked in its lifetime, the same is said on EA's website. obviously my first thought is, that's not true as at one point only a few days ago I had 3 xbox platform accounts linked, now there is 2. after some discussion with an EA help person they were able to tell me that the policy as since changed, you use to be able to have multiple platform accounts linked, seeing as all the accounts were so old they were linked before the policy and stayed that way till the ea account was hacked. I have two options here going forward, continue with ea help and try to get them to add the third account back which doesn't seem possible as they have said they wanna help but physically don't have the tools to do it. even if they removed the other 2 linked xbox accounts, you can only ever have one linked in an EA accounts lifetime. The second option is to log into my friends xbox account which is still linked to the ea account with my apex progress on it and hope cross progression merges my account onto his. he has never played apex on this xbox account and it hasn't had gold since 2014. so in theory my account is the higher level account BUT, the xbox account that the progress is from is no longer linked to the ea account. all I've read online is once you unlink an account you lose stats for that account but your game progress is linked to your ea account? seems a bit of a contradiction and I'm unsure what id actually end up with. I'm in a niche gray area where the progress is saved on the ea account that's being merged but the progress of which the account is from is no longer linked. This has been an extremely stressful situation for me and id appreciate any advice/knowledge of possible outcomes. thank you for your time.