Black screen after grub selection

After a lot of tinkering, this is what I found:

• UEFI settings didn't matter. Some folks encouraged legacy boot, but that's not an option for my platform.
• Others suggested disabling PPT in BIOS or removing the splash from grub settings. This didn't work for me.
• After reading a lot about Intel integrated GPUs not being recognized or not having the appropriate drivers loaded (which are part of the kernel), I tried using various flags for i915 support, but this didn't seem to be a great solution either.
• I tried upgrading my kernel. Apparently i915 support was fixed in the 5.11 branch. However, upgrading past 5.10 is apparently broken on 20.04 and 20.10 unless you want to compile the kernel yourself or use a custom PPA (such as the one provided by tuxinvader). Kernel versions 5.11 and beyond require libc6 >= 2.33 (if you're just pulling the .deb files for them) and updating that on 20.04 and 20.10 isn't really something I want to muck with for a brand new system that I hoped would just work.

What worked, in the end? I just installed a fresh 21.04. Worked out of the box because it ships with kernel version 5.11. No tinkering. No extra config. Just a solved problem.

So, if you're running into a similar issue and have the ability to start fresh or upgrade your distro, this was by far the most straightforward solution.

Extra tip: I needed to write the USB installer with GPT and not MBR due to the chipset/BIOS that this OptiPlex / i7 10700 ships with.