Well I encountered the bug as well. Was only playing this for the badge. Can't say the game enthralled me too much. Whatever the big ass screens were in the upgrade screen achieved nothing when reaching them, they'd turn black.
I encountered the glitch when reaching approx 77 upgrades, last upgrade wasn't a TV screen, it was just a standard upgrade.
Can't say I'm going to delete my progress to get around this, as there's no guarantee that I won't just encounter the same issues.
As a whole the game lacks direction/purpose. A lot of the other launch games have walls to break through which give higher growth when broken through, I ended up just firing and alt-tabbing as there was not point to me trying to squeeze out that extra distance. As others have mentioned there's no overall objective, just fire and repeat.
Patch 0.10 - Gilded Heroes.
It IS possible to "pick" which hero is gilded: Export your save file before clicking on the icon which brings up the chest. If you don't like the hero then import your save, kill a monster and re-open your chest. If you dislike the new result, import and kill two monsters etc... The gilded heroes seem to change with every monster killed but will remain constant, so you will have to kill a further monster every time.
To the Dev, seeing as it's possible to "choose" our gilded hero this way, why not just allow us to pick the hero straight up? It'd also be nifty for us to spend hero souls to reset our gilded heroes.
Whilst I appreciate the excitement generated from random gilded heroes, it makes the playing field uneven as there are definitely better heroes to have gilded than others.
If you're looking for further idea's for Hero soul use, why not use them as experience points to use towards something like hero skill trees?