>Remember: the tinnitus might have started in the ear, but it lives in the brain.

I'm not sure that's true in most cases. There's a NIH paper where they looked at 151 cases where the auditory nerve was cut and "Complete relief of tinnitus was achieved in 101 patients." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7671835

Not that you'd really want that as a treatment.