Well .. sorta ..
The ‘splash’ removal was supposed to stop plymouth from running.
But then
(plymouth is the fancy boot splash that mainly exists as bloat, but sometimes as a boot breaker .. especially if one has missed kernel-mode-setting, or pacnews in general, but sometimes just because it feels like it)
If it were the same issue as previously experienced by users en-masse a bit ago, then you probably do have missing pacnews and/or unconfigured kms .. but also you could probably continue avoiding that by doing your upgrades again while allowing downgrade (spotfix for previously mentioned plymouth fallout)
sudo pacman -Syuu
Of course my 100% honest opinion is that you should kill it with fire permanently.