No boot on external NVMe disk

Posting again here trying to find out why it won't boot from an external USB. The installation of Sonoma went without problems, but only after I switched the cable. I created a user account and disabled automatic updates. Upon reboot it gets about halfway and stalls, so I booted in verbose mode and this is what I see. The USB device is the Realtec RLT9210B-CG. Is it stuck in some kind of loop?