Thanks for tackling this problem! Apparently, I just experienced the same issue (though I did not measure the time it took for the re-login to be prompted) and now seems to be fixed.
In my case this began with an update including this changes. After rebooting and checking everything was in order, I erased my snapper-snapshots and performed a balance (following this guidelines as I usually do before creating a manual snapshot). Everything seemed to go smoothly and I shutdown the system, just to come later to a disaster:
The bootloader (grub) was fine, but the system would not load with either zen or lts kernels.
I had to garuda-chroot into the system to fix it (along the lines )… apparently my system partition got messed up so that its superblock was not being found. I tried some suggestions from this post of and this post: in my case btrfs check /dev/nvme... gave no errors, and the scrub+balance+defrag and reinstall of all my kernels did not solve it.
By following this steps I was able to log into the system… just to find the problem this post addresses.
Regarding this: I followed your suggested steps, but did not add the zram entry to fstab. Instead, I added the suggested vm.stuff configuration from the arch wiki and rebooted to a working system. I think the problem was the missing .conf… but how did that happen?
I have a similar user profile as yours: not much of a tweaker when it comes to system configuration and trust most of it to Garuda devs. Would love to know about how all this came to be… but currently I have no time to look into. So thanks again!