Comment 11 for bug 1982479

Guessing from the description of the symptoms and the dependency on linux-modules-extra I would suspect the problem to be in the i915 driver (which is responsible for accelerated graphics on Intel GPUs). That would also explain problems of SDM to come up. Safe mode would likely choose a much lower resolution on whatever fallback graphics driver the system comes up with.

But then breaking between -39 and -40 makes no sense since there is no change at all to that driver between those versions. Breaking between -40 and -41 would be more plausible since there are 4:

e53980320c13 drm/i915: update new TMDS clock setting defined by VBT
04d6fb5f9f53 drm/i915: Fix SEL_FETCH_PLANE_*(PIPE_B+) register addresses
bf7bdd3e16a4 drm/i915: Check EDID for HDR static metadata when choosing blc
082bac8947b5 drm/i915/display/psr: Unset enable_psr2_sel_fetch if other checks in intel_psr2_config_valid() fails

The first one to me would sound most likely but I don't have that much insight into that driver, so it is hard to make connections between the descriptions and the symptoms described.