Yes.
Unfortunately there is no way to get back to a working graphical environment once it hangs. I’ve done a couple partial updates since to get specific things to work. It’s not been fun package jenga especially without any useful logs, but it’s been enough to get a browser working with help from a friend. Also tried using DISPLAY=:0 from another TTY for it.
Today I got my new disk, I’m going to be reinstalling and slowly migrating [most] of my config back over, and seeing if there is a point where something causes problems. I’ll probably move back to Zen kernel, but I will definitely test others as well; and post the final results here. I almost hope I can reproduce the same issue on a fresh install, just so it can be figured out before the next release.