macOS briefly falls back to console after login

A few days ago, my 2018 MacBook Air entered console mode after logging in:

and then switches back to graphical mode (full video here).

I didn't install any system updates. I didn't see anything in the system logs. Console output shows nothing relevant (AFAIK).

Also, after this issue appeared, macOS asks me to allow incoming network connections for emlog.pl.

Any idea how to debug this issue? I've already tried to reset NVRAM, PRAM and SMC.

Solution 1:

It seems like you have filevault enabled. You also have verbose mode enabled. Because of this macOS needs to finish booting into the decrypted drive and it shows verbose output.
To avoid this disable filevault or verbose mode. That should fix the problem.

To disable filevault go to system preferences->security->FileVault and disable it there. If you want to disable verbose mode then I think you need to change back boot-args by running sudo nvram -d boot-args.

Solution 2:

I've never found this issue's root cause, but it was solved by wiping the disk and re-installing macOS.

This is probably a filevault-related issue but I needed to rule out the possibility of an hardware issue as my MacBook warranty was expiring. So I had to do it the hard way.