I've managed to fix this problem effectively and have concluded that the problem was with the board.

I had to find the Github repo for the board.

There I was able to find the pinout for the board and one thing immediately caught my eye and that was the reversal of pin 16 and 18 on the pinout.

GPIO16 was marked as GP18 on the silk screen and GPIO18 was marked as GP16 on the board.

This was the root cause of all the problems because both of these pins were actively being used by the SPI interface.

Below I've attached the correct pinout for this board.

There is this note on the Github repo too which I think should be printed on the packaging too, this is a pretty serious fault.

Below you can see my board, it shows on the left side

• ...
• GP20
• GP19
• GP16
• GP17
• GP18

Where it should've been,

• ...
• GP20
• GP19
• GP18
• GP17
• GP16

This was the issue and as soon as I connected the pins following the correct pin scheme on the board, the display worked perfectly.