I have made some further progress. I had to edit /etc/66/service/wpa_supplicant, because my WiFi was unable to connect. I had to add:
[environment]
CONF_FILE=/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
WPA_INTERFACE=wlan0
DRIVER=nl80211
and then run:
# 66-disable wpa_supplicant
# 66-enable wpa_supplicant
# 66-start wpa_supplicant
Then I was able to pacman -Syu, but even after updating and rebooting alsa refused to start, so I did alsactl store and alsa could start without error. But I still get the "crashed" message. Here's my new log: https://paste.artixlinux.org/8788324b
The most interesting line is
66-all: fatal: unable to start atomic services list
Edit: Finally, when starting Xorg, keyboard and mouse are still unresponsive.
P.S: One more thing, there seems to be periodical disk writing in regular intervals (about twice per second), constantly. This is something which didn't happen with s6, unsure if it is related to some services being unable to start. - Judging from the logs, likely due to two copies of mysqld accidentally started during testing. Also NetworkManager with default configuration (maybe a similar issue like rc.local?).
P.P.S.: A suggestion related to the Wiki article about migration: I think you should prepend booting from LiveUSB and chrooting as the first step, as when init-related packages are removed, the system hangs, so it must be done anyway. That way, the unnecessary confusion related to system freezing could be avoided altogether.