OK, so this is now a single-boot scenario I believe, correct? That rules out multi-boot being the problem. You’re also seeing the kernel and initramfs load, so this isn’t a case of a fallback bootloader issue probably.
This comment was sent in reply to a completely different issue, but I think the same steps will be useful for debugging here:
Can you try that on the installed system (i.e. rather than booting from a USB drive, try to boot the installed system with modified configuration as described in that post), then report the results?