Looks like some strange problem in my desktop.
My laptop did not have this issue!
I tried removing some recent updates without success. Then I thought it could have something to so with graphics (as is often the case). The desktop has nvidia, and laptop doesn’t.
So I re-installed nvidia-dkms after booting with the LTS kernel.
And (almost) surprisingly that solved the boot issue.
Again, having another kernel installed saved the day (or at least made it easier).