Glad you got your system back up and running :)
It may be worth instead adding this to your initramfs for early loading. This is mentioned on the wiki[1], but not really in reference to your problem, so it's not surprising if you missed it.
No I had this configuration before, and it stopped working after the last update, as described.
[Andy@A-Pieters ~]$ fgrep -i nv /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)
#MODULES=(nvidia i915)
The one thing I don't know is if this was actually successful.
When I look in the initcpio via lsinitcpio I do see usr/lib/firmware/nvidia in there with loads of folders and .bin.zst files AND looking for modules does yield results:
[Andy@A-Pieters ~]$ lsinitcpio -l /boot/initramfs-linux.img | awk '/nvid/ && /mod/'
usr/lib/modules/6.9.10-arch1-1/updates/dkms/nvidia-drm.ko.zst
usr/lib/modules/6.9.10-arch1-1/updates/dkms/nvidia-modeset.ko.zst
usr/lib/modules/6.9.10-arch1-1/updates/dkms/nvidia-uvm.ko.zst
usr/lib/modules/6.9.10-arch1-1/updates/dkms/nvidia.ko.zst
etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-power-management.conf
etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf
usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia-utils.conf
The kernel is started with modeset also:
[Andy@A-Pieters ~]$ sudo dmesg -T
[Thu Jul 25 08:02:31 2024] Linux version 6.9.10-arch1-1 (linux@archlinux) (gcc (GCC) 14.1.1 20240522, GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.42.0) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu, 18 Jul 2024 18:06:13 +0000
[Thu Jul 25 08:02:31 2024] Command line: initrd=\intel-ucode.img initrd=\initramfs-linux.img root=UUID=beep-beep-fart-fart rw nvidia-drm.modeset=1 resume=PARTUUID=... acpi_osi=! acpi_osi='Linux'
Yes I did recompile and install the DKMS drivers after every update and it does run mkinitcpio also, so that's why I was pulling out my beard and at the end said fork that, I'll just load the module manually...