It's just an idea I've been noodling on that hinges on Hawking radiation existing and having the same formula regardless of whether a black hole is standalone or has matter falling into it. The radiation would form an outward force not just through light pressure, but by space rebounding out to balance anything trying to fall in.

I'd like to see better proofs around stuff like neutron degeneracy pressure and the strong force. Electron degeneracy pressure is straightforward to understand from quantum mechanics, but I don't know if there's direct measurement of the strength of neutron repulsion from particle accelerators. Maybe the value they're using is empirical from the stars they've observed.

The way I think of it now is that neutron stars evaporate too, so if one is on the brink of collapse, we'd have to add enough mass to overcome that rate of loss and also get the black hole lifetime long enough that it goes into runaway collapse. Otherwise its mass will go back to decreasing slowly. Although if you look at the note at the bottom of the link, it states that objects heavier than 0.75% of Earth's mass are growing heavier due to absorbing the cosmic microwave background energy. So maybe all neutron stars eventually collapse on their own trillions of years from now.

Some other interesting ideas come out of that, like the center of a neutron star is probably nearly frozen in time as it withstands the flow of space into it. Like in the movie Interstellar where every hour on the water planet equates to 7 years in orbit. Or here on Earth where GPS systems have to compensate for time running slower for us on the surface. The center would also be nearly infinitely contracted by its Lorentz transformation, so the space around it would look thin to us outside but be normal thickness from its point of reference. So in a very real way, there's more space inside the star than we see from its radius. So much in fact that the center can be thought of as being nearly infinitely far away, even lightyears away. So spaghettification may make it so neighboring neutrons don't feel as squeezed along the radial axis as those nearer to the surface. Or maybe there's a stagnation line where gravity forms a dimple in spacetime, but if the density gets too high, the line advances inward until it reaches the center and tears through to form a singularity.

But see, we'd have to wait an eternity for the tear to occur from our frame of reference, which suggests that black holes never actually form. They just get deeper and slower, mimicking black hole physics if we think of them as a black box, but behaving differently inside than our intuition suggests.

I think modern physicists tend to prune ideas too early as being untenable or already explored. So they haven't thought through these sorts of edge cases enough. For example, we may not be able to actually reach a singularity by falling in. It's so small that we may end up missing and orbiting instead. That might have ramifications for quantization of the strong force or could explain why mass forms clouds instead of collapsing into points, and relate to String Theory (which I'm not fond of, but is worth mentioning). I have so many basic questions like these that it's hard to reason about this stuff without it feeling like hand waving. And since nobody can point to a definitive answer, these lines of questioning are still valid and worth pursuing IMHO.

Edit: I'm still not entirely sure about the 4th paragraph and how distance to the center works. If we think of neutrons near the center as sitting on platforms, nearly frozen in time, and we could fall in without hitting anything (like a neutrino) then when would we reach the sitting neutrons? Would it take a long time to get to them (lightyears), or would we sail on past (in about 1/10 of a light second) with our clock synced to someone outside since we never hit anything?