Okay! Wild update!
So following your suggestion to doublecheck vulkan with:
sudo pacman -S vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader
I ran that on the terminal and got the “Warning already up to date” so they’re definitely installed. But what could it hurt, I let it just reinstall for giggles. Well… a quick re-log later and NMS launched just like it used to!
Yay, right? Well now that I’ve fixed it I should finally allow my system to update and get all the outstanding patches/fixes/etc. The list of updates had nothing to do with vulkan, just a minor kernel update, some random system packages, ixni, nothing wild. Go figure after updating I’m back to the same error! Even though vulkan wasn’t messed with in the updated packages!
Well with nothing to lose I re-reinstalled vulkan and lib32-vulkan and bam! Worked a second time.
So apparently whatever update was made to vulkan last week now craps itself when you update anything else on your system lol. What a weird issue.