Ran sudo pacman -Syu; sudo pacman -Syy like I do every few days

Syy forces the package database to be updated even if no updates are available.

In my opinion, this makes no sense, especially after you have already run pacman -Syu before. Basically, you only generate additional, unnecessary traffic on the mirror you are using. Pacman -Syu is normally always sufficient.

The journal was really long so I moved past it

The display of the systemd journal can be easily filtered. For example, with journalctl -p err -b -1, all entries of the last boot process that are marked as error, critical, alarm or emergency are displayed.

Has anyone else ran into this issue when updating?

Not me. But other users do. Some of them also use a distribution other than Arch (or a distribution based on it). When I look at the problems, the current kernel is probably quite a minefield as far as problems are concerned.

Any advice for preventing future crashes or issues like this so I don’t fear updating?

As other users have already recommended, you could additionally install the LTS kernel. And if you use BTRFS as a file system, create snapshots before an update (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/snapper#Wrapping_pacman_transactions_in_snapshots).

And it should be obvious that important data should be backed up on a regular basis.