Good post. However, this article refers to coastal areas, not the inland ice-free regions, which were mostly polar desert, so wouldn’t support much life. There was a large tundra region within it though that could have.
Archaeological evidence has been found inland above the ice that cut off the habitable coastal areas: https://unews.utah.edu/ancient-babies-boost-bering-land-bridge-layover/ but those remains are 12KBP; still, the DNA suggests much older ancestry.
There is archaeological evidence that people lived on the central Alaska mainland for hundreds or possibly several thousand years until the ice barrier blocking passage to the inland glacial rift melted away.
As far as I know, passage down the coast to America did not start until a thousand years or more after the inland route opened up.