fixed by @skullgiver : it was an entry in /etc/crypttab.

Thanks for all the help everyone. This was an awesome experience.

I don't know how stupid this was to do but many articles suggested it should be fine.

I resized my mouted root partition. Showed a bunch of warnings on resizing a mounted drive but it worked. Also did a sudo resize2fs /dev/sdaX to complete it.

Went from: winEFI, Win11, EFI, root, swap, data1, data2, win-recovery

To : winEFI, Win11, EFI, root, new-data1, win-recovery

But now every boot takes an additional 60-90 seconds with a blank screen. Pressing ESC shows the above log.

I am unsure of how to fix this or even what caused this. The root partition still starts from the same and only grew to right. Is this because of the deleted swap ?

The operations were performed via GParted but I followed this : https://askubuntu.com/questions/24027/how-can-i-resize-an-ext-root-partition-at-runtime

PS: Pop 22.04 Nvidia. Relatively fresh (~3mo) install but severely miscalculated how much size I needed.