Wow you certainly learned a lot trouble shooting that.

I haven't had something that annoying happen, usually it's been install and use.

BUT putting Linux on an ancient dell box was a learning experience. I installed the system on the HDD. After shutdowns the aystem would wake back up. The solution was adding kernel quirks line to grub boot with a numeric code, which told the hardware to ignore the self wake up event from the USB bus.

Then when I wanted speed the bios didn't support NVME boot. So I had to add a small ssd for boot partition , but have rest of system on the NVME drive. I didn't want to reinstall and resetup so I was learning a lot about gparted and copy pasting partitions and editting fstab to cobble together a replicated set of partitions. It was a great way to understand how formatting, partitioning and mounts all worked.