I'm having an issue with dietpi booting on an odroid-hc4, here's the related issue - MichaIng/DietPi#5336
Petitboot reads the auto detected /boot/boot.scr file, with what resolves to a badly configured file path, but is a valid directory, and writes an empty dtb file to /tmp/ and then fails during boot.
In this case the boot.scr file is setting a partial path that is a valid directory, but not a valid file (i.e. /boot/dtb is the partial path, the full/correct path should be /boot/dtb/amlogic/meson-sm1-odroid-hc4.dtb, but an environment variable is not properly configured in the boot.scr file)
It seems like pb isn't validating that it's opening a directory as a file, and so it doesn't generate a failure / remove the auto boot option, because it succeeds in opening and copying 0 bytes to it's tmp location.