Booting to black after graphics driver update. Recurrent problem fixed with mhwd. Why does this happen?

If you check linux*-nvidia’s dependencies, you can see it does not only needs the associated kernel version, but also packages that can keep on updating “independently” from the kernel. And as dependency requirements shall stay valid, the package manager may need to remove the package in order to update the dependencies.
Beside this, since those dependencies can still be updated, they may do so beyond the compatibility with the dropped packages, which then may not work correctly.