it took me more searching than i feel i should have had to do, but i found a guide to attempt the fedora 43 upgrade from a terminal, so i'm doing that over SSH right now.
turns out that, going by advice i was given by someone else last month, it *WAS* due to wine being installed (terminal was throwing "inferior architecture" warnings and aborting). removing wine-dxvk* with dnf and starting over seems to be progressing.
@wildweasel this machine hates prime numbers I guess?
one reboot later and we're still on 42