Considering the type of driver that preaches about transmissions, I would argue that machines don't make enough decisions in their case.

Actually it's neither. It's a slippery slope.

automatic vs manual transmission is an odd debate to have. Why argue only about the transmission? Why not have cars with manual ignition? If you dislike machines making your life easier, stop driving all together.

go find your boot drive, boot into the installation environment, check if your drive is still there with lsblk, chroot into your system and run a pacman -Syu. It should probably fix it