It was only Manjaro, and I blame it for doing something to my ventoy drive as it nearly removed it for some reason. I had to reinstall ventory and put the IOS back on there.
A fringe distro can cause a panic and crash. I forget what distro it was (only instance I experienced this and it was years ago), but the installer would crash to a garbled screen. But you're right it is rare, to not boot at all. I assume it is from using some windows tool that fucks up the flags or something and writes it like a storage device? Except for that one case where I'm pretty sure the distro itself was fucked, dd has always worked for me ^_^
Secure boot was my first guess. I have a friend on Mint with an Nvidia card, and until secure boot was disabled, the nvidia driver wouldn't load (and the open source nouveau was loading instead). She wasn't even getting the second monitor to be detected until the right drivers were loading.