I’m glad I saw this here on Monday. I went right away and was able to use my Reward Certificate to buy a Brinker gc, but the system denied my $10 Best Buy gc. They said it disallowed it starting last week, like you posted.
So I go over to Customer Service and explained to them how I just tried to use the $10 BB GC to buy the Brinker gc, but got denied. So I confirmed with them that GC amounts under $5 could be cashed out (state law). She looked it up on her computer and confirmed it. So I said I would be back shortly with a couple $3 items and do the buy/return process to cash out the entire $10, she agreed.
I find a couple items, and she says the manager told her to just cash out the entire $10 gc for me. Took her a little while to do it because the system wouldn’t allow it all at once, she had to buy 2 - $5 Best buy gc then cash them out. I didn’t really ask for details. So I got my $10 cash.
She could see the cashout policy for all 50 states, and told me California allows cashouts of gc amount $9.99 or less, and some allow no cashout at all. Good to know.