Report a bug to Nvidia?

Will do - but since I could only replicate this on my desktop (as I have no other Nvidia device), I was posting here for a few reasons:

1. To see if anyone else faces the same end result as I do.
2. To see if this is common, and gather as much info before reaching out to Nvidia
3. To see if Kali can possibly introduce a patch to temporarily mitigate the issue if it is common (very unlikely, but still worth asking)

it kicks into TTY1, instead of TTY7 - for whatever reason.

There must be logs somewhere :) Maybe when you install the nvidia packages (I suppose it should rebuild the initrd, does that appear in the log, no error?). And then on reboot, if it goes to TTY, it probably means the initrd fails, and there should be logs (I guess /var/log/syslog, or journalctl or somewhere else).

We can't give support for hardware-related problems (no bandwidth), but if you find and paste the offending logs here, someone might be able to help.

For No.1 and No.2 https://forums.kali.org/ could have wider audience