Updated system, now cannot log in for love or money

Updated as usual via dnf update, and when I rebooted, the system locked hard and the fan spun for 5 minutes with nothing going on.
I hard powered off.
Power on and no matter which kernel I choose, I get a flash of messages (which no human could possibly read) and then a blank screen with a flashing cursor.

No Bueno.

I entered rescue mode and was only able to press “Enter” and get this message:

Of course, I back up my computer every morning, but I really don’t want to reconfigure this system.

Please help.

P.S. I have full disk encryption turned on and I do get that dialog and I am able to unlock the disk, so that is something. I guess.

It is quite possible that by powering off and not waiting for control to return that the file system is corrupted, especially since it cannot even mount /boot/efi.

I would suggest that you boot a live usb stick and run fsck on every partition on that drive. Once done then try booting the system again.

This type issue is why I disagree with the common practice of the system leaving the root account locked, but at least booting to a live system gives you a similar access.