When pinctrl is configuring SDA/SDL lines, S0D1 mode is supposed to be enforced as noted by this comment however the function nrf_pin_configure does not use the drive argument and instead extracts it from the encoded pinctrl through NRF_GET_DRIVE(pin).
The result is S0S1 mode on i2c by default causing the bus to fail on init. A workaround can be used by manually setting nordic,drive-mode = <NRF_DRIVE_S0D1>in the pinctrl.