@clyde for sure this guy is a heaven in copyright
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Edit: So as to what mitu and the others spoke of, I feel so dumb. Like I said earlier, I was able to boot into noobs just fine, and I had raspbian full installed at the same time as my retropie. I tried accessing the files for retropie that way earlier to see if I could recover my retropie or change configs or remove powerblock drivers, etc... But the issue I had was nothing showed up under the Raspbian desktop file manager earlier. I reinstalled everything after having lost it all earlier, and when I reset up my raspbian desktop just now, I got a link for retropie on the desktop. GO FIGURE, it only showed up after updating and rebooting raspbian desktop....
Since i rarely ever use the desktop os and mainly only ever use retropie, it didnt cross my mind to try updating and rebooting raspbian and see if I could access those files again. So to reiterate, as the others have mentioned if anyone ever stumbles across this and is in the boat I was in, if you're lucky enough to have raspbian installed as well as your retropi, you CAN access your retropie files and fix the mess as mitu said. Hopefully this saves someone else 6hrs+ of recovering lol.

Just a note, obviously it won't help much at this stage, but certainly don't take it as an attack. I'm sure that was not the intention of @madmodder123 either, and I can imagine how frustrating it may be.

This last weekend not only was I backing things up to my laptop, but also to two separate external drives, and then even to Google Drive, just because if I do have to do it all over again - curating the games, artwork, media, settings, etc - I can imagine I'll lose motivation somewhat.

So, while I'm not going to repeat the suggestion for backing things up often, I can suggest for future setups to have your ROMs in an external USB thumb drive. At least for me it's been extremely helpful as if the SD card gets bricked because of an update, even though it's somewhat painful to have to reconfigure it all, it's nothing compared to having to recover your games, artwork, media, savegames, highscores, etc.

That might help you somewhat for the future.

Still, the warning is important. Wondering if it's kernel related or other packages - likely kernel but I'm not a Linux expert here.

sounds like your memory stick just failed. It happens, and probably has nothing to do with retropie or the raspberry pi. just coincidence.