I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but Nvidia?

Nvidia Arch user here, are you just forgetting to rebuild your kernel modules after a kernel or nvidia driver update?

You can just add a pacman hook that triggers mkinitcpio -P after the linux or nvidia packages are updated. I’ve never had a no-GUI situation from a stray update… maybe one or two that were my own doing when trying to set up UKI’s though.