For the NVIDIA cursor fix from my initial post, StackOverflow: Hyprland mouse disappears after Application start
I can now confirm that the issue has nothing to do with Nvidia. I gave up because it looks like I installed something under the Kernels tab on the Garuda Assistant that caused issues with my Nvidia dkms driver. I should not have touched that tab in hindsight. I decided to reinstall the OS and start over. However, I immediately ran into the wallpaper issue after clean install after I ran:
garuda-update
and rebooted. I selected the default=1 option or the default option during the update. I have not installed the nvidia driver yet.