Pixel 4a stuck in boot cycle

My daughter's pixel 4a recently got stuck in a booting cycle and won't complete the boot up. It cycles about 4-5 times of the Google logo, a progress circle, briefly shows the lock screen with the current photo, then restarts the process. It finally ends in an android recovery screen, says it can't load the system, and options for retry again or factory reset.

We tried holding the power and volume up to shut it off, and power and volume down to get the boot loader screen. Same end result after a while.

We don't think any updates were recently installed, she never lets it do that because it just works and doesn't want to deal with an update failure bricking the phone.

Any idea what happened or how to get past it?