Comment 4 for bug 1886022

Yes. And still intermittent.

More data that might or might not be useful: I got frustrated trying to get the grub menu to appear and uninstalled plymouth. So, I can tell you that this happens at tty[1-4] as well as after 'startx'. (LXDE is installed) I think it is less likely to happen without plymouth installed. It's hard to get good data, though, bc intermittent. Remote logins (ssh) still happen mostly slowly but occasionally quickly.

Another issue that might be related. I had to stop/disable networking.service partway through attempting to apt update (after the -39 test and now back at -40) because the machine stopped knowing where to find a DNS server, ignoring my entries (and lack of entries) in netplan and attempts at 'netplan apply'. I had disabled network-manager long ago. After stopping networking.service, 'netplan apply' was obeyed and I had DNS again. Even after disabling networking and network-manager, two unconfigured interfaces still come up at boot (via DHCP).