Systemctl gives DBus connection errors in certain situations. And, other than to those quite familiar with systemd, it's NOT an obvious falsehood. I know you get a lot of uncalled-for personal crap from snipers, but does it help for you to respond to other people in a bordering-on-insulting fashion?
I'm not sure, but there's probably some combination of a couple of silly little bugs here:
a) If emergency mode had root mounted RO (I'm not sure if that happened at shutdown or at beginning of emergency mode): Going to emergency mode with root RO when some ancillary fs has failed to mount (I don't remember what old initscripts did, but I think they first mounted / RW before mounting rest?)
b) Shutdown having become fragile in the face of a RO /. I've had old init + initscripts in a similar situation, & services would fail to stop, but init would eventually reboot anyway. A fragile reboot can be a huge problem if you're remote and have no physical access to the power/reset buttons.
c) A slightly misleading or confusing error message from systemctl.
d) Unrelated to my original post, but also evident in those photos: Parallel jobs stomp over the tty with output. Particularly confusing if you've missed the fact you're supposed to type in a passphrase. (This possibly isn't a little bug, in terms of fixing it).
Bugs, which will be fixed no doubt, I'm sure. Also, just because a messenger doesn't have a perfectly set-out message, doesn't mean the messenger should then be shot.