Can I recover the WhatsApp chat history from a damaged phone?
You can, if you can save everything in the /data/data/com.whatsapp folder. Your logs will be in /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases but they are encrypted as you mentioned and encryption key is in /data/data/com.whatsapp/files/key. Proper transfer of these files will mean a successful operation. Once you start Whatsapp on another phone with the /data folder from your broken phone and start Whatsapp, it will prompt you to activate Whatsapp on this phone with a text like "This account wasn't activated on this phone, please activate" and once you do, it'll be successfully done.