Alright. Sold the POS to the next door neighbors! Hour later, they want their money back.

So before taking it out to my burn pit out back, here goes. I have a UEFI board in this lappy, SecureBoot is "DISABLED", and UEFI mode is enabled. (no legacy bios). GPT drive. of the PCIe NVMe variety. Buyer beware/be aware... Awseome cause their so fast, small, and run cool. Not awesome cause they suck with support in Linux. So yes, having an SSD drive which is also a NVMe M.2 drive, is like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no rope...

I can't in good conscious advocate for them.
So I can boot (barely, and to the point where I really don't want to reboot and see if it will boot back up) but only in "recovery mode". Every other way, I get the 1 minute 30 second "A start job is running you stupid POS blah blah blah...
Yes I have a separate vfat partition that is mounted as /boot/efi. Yes it is set to boot and as the ESP. (this is /dev/nvme0n1p1, or /boot/efi) The root OS (VSIDO of course) is installed at /dev/nvme0n1p3. And onward to the /home partition which is at /dev/nvme0n1p4. This is the new naming scheme for the new PCIe (not so new anymore) NVMe solid state drives.
I just want to be able to boot normally. I know it will, nothing is broken, something is just 'confused'. I need to be able to issue the command in the cli that tells the system/kernel/OS? how to identify the devices in /dev. i.e. /dev/disk/by-id/ or /dev/disk/by-uuid/. I have all the correct UUID's setup and still it hoses on boot with the minute thirty second BS.
I've reinstalled grub-efi, edited /etc/fstab till my face turned blue and my wife called an ambulance. (just kidding, chill) and more 'other' lesser things to no avail. Not sure what happened with lwfitz, but he was also experiencing some kind of issue and I think I read at some point recently PackRat having some of these minute 30 second BS thing-a-ma-jig episodes...
whew now i'm really tarred