Here’s a couple of logs from some builds I’ve tried.
CoreELEC-S905.arm-8.90.5.img:
https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/jS6tBmcdT8/
Armbian_5.34_S9xxx_Debian_stretch_4.9.40_server_20171112.img:
https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/z8g8PVB66H/ <— success!!
NOTE: I believe other Armbian builds do successfully load the kernel, but it fails from there, so I assume some sort of kernel/hardware problem and not a fault of the bootloader