Huh. Following the boot splash instructions in the #FreeBSD Handbook https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-splash.html burned me because, for whatever reason, my PC starts up at 1920x1080, not vesa, before the boot menu. I think it kernel-panicked because it kept rebooting.

To boot successfully again, I had to get a loader prompt (option 3) & type:
disable-module vesa
boot