I installed those two packages and started Gparted again.
The EFI filesystem is there but the exclamation point is gone now
Make sure you also install those packages in the chroot environment. It may be why installing GRUB failed in the first place.
How do I do that?
I installed them with sudo.
I tried rebooting after that and nothing changed.
Then Windows grabbed the PC and I have to wait for the old dinosaur to load and shut down properly. It gets angry if I cut the power on it lol.
Does the chroot environment, install them on the actual PC, instead of the USB instance?
Now after I rebooted, I can’t install anything anymore.
When I try:
$ sudo pacman -Sy
it says, “failed to sychronize all databases (invalid or corrupted database (PGP Signature))”
error: GPGME error: no data
and on
Yes.
crimeny.
running massive update.
I remember the days when an operating system was just a simple menu utility to list and run the files on your computer 
They sure were simpler times lol
No, that’s a file manager. The underlying operating system was most likely DOS or CP/M, although those two were not really operating systems. They would load an executable into memory and pass full control of the computer onto it, and then when the application ended, they would reload the command interpreter into memory, or at least, if the executable hadn’t messed things up so badly that only a reboot would still offer solace.
But that said, UNIX is much older than either DOS or CP/M, and was also much more powerful from the beginning, because it was multitasking and offered concurrent multiuser access via time-sharing.
The above all said, at least you were able to boot into your installed system again now. 
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You weren’t going to let me have that were you lol!
Anyway does the chroot environment execute commands on the local system? Because those tools vanished after I rebooted. They must have just been installed on the liveUSB instance
Nope, because I’m going to claim the solution here. 
Well, if you installed those packages inside the chroot, then yes. But the chroot only applies within the terminal. The rest of the system was still running off of the USB/CD/DVD, and so if you used the GUI package manager, then that will have worked only in the live environment of the USB/CD/DVD.
Well hang on before I pin that medal on you, because this is going to be a gold lol.
I installed mtools in the chroot environment and I see the EFI partition there if I launch gparted from within chroot environment.
Its already flagged as ‘boot’ and ‘esp’.
Now what?
Well, you could boot from it, so apparently it works, no? 
I haven’t tried that yet. Still in the live USB instance.
But I did launch gparted and then ran the install in the chroot environment, and the “!” is gone next to the EFI partition.
Should I do anything else, or just reboot?
Or am I supposed to go back and do all the steps here:
I think it should work now…
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well I’ll try rebooting.
But. Experience has not made me optimistic on this one lol
Nope same thing.
If I boot Manjaro, it brings up a grub menu with “UEFI Firmware Settings” as the only option. If I pick that, the PC shuts off
Its weird because all the files are there. I can get to a grub prompt and list and see all the filesystems
It is weird indeed. Well, maybe someone else can pitch in now, because I’m out of ideas and it’s closing in on 02:00 in the morning over here, so I’m going to offline for the night… 
What about the other steps in your solution? I hadn’t done any of them. Or did they not apply here
Yeah it looks like the updates didn’t take on the actual PC.
When I rebooted the EFI partition is in error again.
How to reinstall those packages (mtools, dosfstools) on the actual PC, not the live USB instance?
Maybe I can drop to a # prompt off the grub menu?