Wow, thank you! I have not had the time to look at this deeply yet, but it looks highly probably that this is the culprit. I just recently added debug to the kernel command line and this failure coincides with it.
What’s a little confusing is that it seems its an issue with systemd having log_level=debug, which is set that way when debug appears on the kernel command line. However, I’ve set systemd back to info using systemctl log-level info, which I would think might get rid of the issue. Regardless, I think this is the missing part to solving this.