the shutdown command was a warning not a request.

Such wise words.

Love it or loathe it, systemctl is trying to do the right thing with regard to stability and data preservation.

If you really mean it, the manual offers a few levels of strength beyond the plain one: -i (don’t check for busy processes, which is what’s going on in the meme), -f (force, presumably asks even less nicely), and -f -f (don’t even ask, just do it now, preservation be damned).

You can do that to Windows. They may have gotten better, but I know that my friend that ran Debian Unstable back in the late '90s-'00s swore that if he didn’t properly shut down the machine every year or so, it would mess up his build.

Have you tried the lazy option?

I’ve recently had so many random freezes of the system, hangs on shutdown, panics on shutdown, freezes in system updates, that hard reset became a thing I did several times a day. Yet there were no systemd logs, nothing in dmesg, literally zero information on what happened.

I was skeptical in blaming Nvidia because at this point it became a Linux chiche, but then I started to switch to integrated graphics (disabling dGPU) and all of the problems miraculously went away.

The kernel is cleaning the corpses out of the basement freezer chest before the power goes out and stinks up the place.

kill -9 1