- NVMe devices are not popular for very long. So they are kind of “new”, even though they are already available to normal people for years.
- I’ve heard already people having problems with NVMe devices, when using it with Linux.
Though, I think the part about the wrongly chosen ESP partition seems the most likely one being responsible for the issue. When you manually partition the medium during the installation process, you have to create an ESP partition OR you have to choose an already existing one. If you let the installer do this process, then it has to do the right thing (EITHER choose a previous one OR make a new one) and that probably isn’t as reliable as it should be.
(I’ve seen people having tons of ESP partitions, because each installer was duplicating them for no good reason…)
So the problem now is, that if you have more than one ESP partition, you are already in a mess and the system is confused about what to do, since there are basically 2 bosses telling you to do 2 opposite things at the same time.
To avoid that, one needs to manually select the ESP partition, that already existed before instead of letting the installer do that on its own.
In the example shown the OP has more than one storage medium. In that case, 2 ESPs can exist side-by-side, independent of each other, but to make that work, they still need to be selected and marked manually during the installation process, to – again – avoid confusion.
Currently, I have 1 SSD with Windows on it and 1 SSD with Linux on it (I left out the other storage media for simplicity). They have the ESPs set up the way I described in the previous paragraph. They are both on their own, but they don’t get confused by each other. That is, because I always manually partition everything and never let the installer or whatever tool do it for me.