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What I did was to use another internet connection. I was able to pass that screen after using a mobile hotspot instead of my wifi connection. So if the activation fails on one connection just try to use another one from a different provider if available if apple returns the certificate error. Also changing your DNS servers from your router may help (use google one or another free dns that may resolve the connection to another endpoint).

I had the same issue after updating to MacOS Catalina then wiping the MacBook 2018 with Touch Bar(T2 chip). The macbook restarted and then I was stuck on 1008f error. The solution for me was to remove the macbook from find my [device] app(from icloud.com) and to remove the device from my devices(on my iphone with ios13 is found on the apple ID section). I have also unenrolled from beta test program(no idea if that helped in any way). After removing the mac from icloud and my devices the macbook booted into recovery mode and needed to activate(so apple deactivated the t2 chip and needed activation like the one on the iphones). The process failed a couple of times with a message saying that tbsc.apple.com is unable to verify certificate and the only option was to restart the macbook and start again with the internet recovery. I was able to activate the macbook using my mobile hotspot from the iPhone and after that I was greeted with the well known recovery screen where I was able to format the SSD and perform a restore from my backup harddrive. So, what I can say is that error is related in my case to icloud wipe that I’ve done and I was close to get my mac serviced at apple because I bricked it. Just as a precaution, what I recommend is to have a backup of the data because with the new macbooks you can loose your data if there is any problem with the T2 chip.