It's pretty random that an arbitrary number of reboots up to 15 times fixes the issue.

That sounds like there is either:

- some kind of upstream issue with deploying a fix (so most of the reboots are effectively no-ops relative to the fix)

- some kind of local reboot threshold before the system bypasses the bad driver file somehow.

The former I can see because of the complexity of update deployment on the internet, but if it's the latter then that's very non-deterministic behavior for local software.