Real world paper notepad!

Notepad

Yes normal password but it happens super early on mine, and once you log in there is a boot progress bar afterwards. This is an Intel Mac, might be different on apple chips.

Mac will ask you to “log in” very early in the boot process to decrypt the disk, I assume it keeps the drive key encrypted with your password somewhere.

Uninstallled python to upgrade it. Pretty much the entire os depends on python and was also uninstalled.