Linux user of 20ish years here. I run Mint with cinnamon on my desktop PC - sometimes I just want stuff to work out of the box.

Had the same issue for my nvidia 4060. I just installed a kernel manually which allowed me to run a new enough driver.

Not necessarily. I’ve seen failures like this if the boot partition works, but fails to mount the root partition. systemd then fails to proceed, and shuts down the running services.

Not without mounting its root partition on the failing harddrive