Just for completions sake I have now:
removed amdvlk
installed vulkan-icd-loader
moved all json files in /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d into a subfolder named "old"
added environment variable
VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json
garuda-update
update-grub
Changes were to try and get vulkan working, with the idea being that there could be a misconfiguration with having amd drivers present. amdvlk was the only one I could uninstall without dependency error from garuda-video-linux-config. I couldn't find much information on that, but I presume it's a helper package for the Settings Manager or something.
Good news is that nvidia-settings, vulkaninfo, and vkcubed all return expected results, but it's still confusing to me that it only works in recovery mode.