Since the system failed after a software update, I decided to do more of
them. You could instead back out of them.

sudo dnf update

Failure:
There was a set of kernel packages that seemed to be half installed.

I removed the half that was installed and asked again for an update. It
worked.

This doesn't make sense. The kernel is the only package you can install multiples of. It will never only have one kernel "rpm" installed. Even if it failed to install part of it - you should have been able to boot to an older kernel. Did you try that?

Thanks!

Dhaval