We're talking about the equivalent of booting with init=/bin/sh, I don't remember kernel init on x86 ever being that slow

Oh yeah, well that may be. Once I got X working in Slack, I did boot into that, but then again, back then I didn't know how to recompile my kernel and the machine did this interesting loop where it would try a few different drivers until it got to the one that worked with my matsushita CD drive.