likey something to do with encryption then… which is over my head.
This may be really far off but I’ve had a similar bug when trying KDE Linux on my Framework Laptop 13, and I think it might be related to the fingerprint reader, because I noticed it seemed to log in faster when I touched my finger to the reader after entering my password (but it could have been a coincidence, as I did not test this thoroughly).
Just something to try, I suppose. I wish I took the time to report this when I was testing.
FWIW I disabled my laptop’s TPM in the BIOS and it shaved a good 5 seconds off the boot time. Presumably from no longer hitting systemd-tpm2-setup-early.service and systemd-tpm2-setup.service fail after upgrading to v259 · Issue #40159 · systemd/systemd · GitHub.
Lightning quick now!