I wanted to setup a headless Samba server - so after the reboot I didn't even have any way of knowing why the system wouldn't appear on the network anymore. I had to find the right HDMI adapter to see if the system even attempts to start as it was completely dead by all other indications.

And no, I'm sorry but I hate the argument of "you should have known better" - the system first and foremost shouldn't have defaults set up in such a way that not only the SSH server doesn't come up in case of an issue during boot, but the local console is entirely disabled for any access. That's a crazy default.