Another bad day started for the rpi. After upgrading to today's 20220723 build, the green led did not stop blinking for like 15-20 minutes and commands like htop were not available again while .
However, this time it even decided to drop the wired (= could not connect wirelessly again) network connection and kill my putty session! It let me reconnect though.
Good thing I had btop handy to check what it is doing. The problem is, it was doing nothing really. All its 4 cores were at <5%, there was no io activity (unless btop fails to grab stats for the sd card, network activity was at 10kb/s and the only odd thing I noticed was some rm command that ran once and stopped. I could not check what it was deleting because its line was too short, but it finished doing so.
Finally, the above behavior is still observed after 3 boots: reboot > download the update and let it update > boot to that mess > reboot > boot again to that mess > reboot > boot to that mess for the third time. And I am now waiting for it to stop and issue a poweroff.
Also, at this last boot, there is this thing in dmesg that repeats many times
[ 273.156515] hdmi-audio-codec hdmi-audio-codec.0.auto: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_startup on i2s-hifi: -19
[ 273.156536] MAI: soc_pcm_open() failed (-19)
Normally cec would complain about not being able to connect, and although such messages did appear on the previous dmesg outputs along with the one above, now only the one above fills dmesg.