After seeing the following thread get resolved by the same solution marked here:
I wonder if filing a bug report as suggested in the original dmesg is a good idea. Maybe they wouldn’t be so welcoming of people using Arch derivatives though… 
Double-checking the links I sent in the second post in this topic, the OP has a very slightly different issue where the kernel params suggested by the dmesg didn’t work. In addition, the same person posted on the Arch forums about the piece of hardware that causes this:
03:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS525A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=288095
^ Also contains details about blacklisting the drivers if you’re interested and the kernel params didn’t work for you.
My laptop has this (doesn’t show in garuda-inxi but does show in virt-manager) and that might be why I was dumped into an emergency shell as opposed to the other threads here where people get a hard freeze on loading initial ramdisk.