I’m confused now (yeah, I know, it generally doesn’t take much!). I thought the EFI being on vfat thing was part of the original problem.
No, /boot being a FAT filesystem was – or that was the/my suspect at least, i.e., whatever instance of Grub that was in charge of booting not being setup to be able to load kernel and/or initramfs from FAT.
Said Grub instance itself needs to be on the EFI System Partition, i.e., a FAT filesystem of usually around 500M or so from which the BIOS loads it, and which is normally mounted to /boot/efi.
The “most normal” situation is a non split-off /boot, i.e., with /boot simply on /; you have (Manjaro) ext4 / on /dev/sda1, FAT /boot on /dev/sda3 and FAT /boot/efi on /dev/nvme0n1p1, latter your actual ESP.
Oh, I see, OK, thanks for the explanation.
Just to clear the confusion with the terms a bit for future:
The “EFI System Partition” is normally refereed to as ESP for short.
Your Motherboards UEFI-BIOS firmware uses your ESP to boot your operating systems, and most UEFI-BIOS’es can only read FAT32 formatted ESP’s.
Thus in short never refer to a partition as EFI but instead use ESP, because EFI is a name used for the technology and ESP for the partition holding data for that technology.
(Yes these two terms are misused all over the internet because people are confused or unknowing of the difference)
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