That is good but only shows the last 10-15 lines of the log, unless there is an arg to expand that, or a command to follow the log. I am aware of neither.
I usually use your suggested command to check if a service is up, then if it isn't, use journalctl to find out why.
Well written, and I learned a few things from this story. I recently started a cloud of my own with 4 20TiB HDDs in a raid 5 configuration so this story felt very prescient to me. Makes me very grateful for the simplicity of Cockpit and LUKS2.. my setup felt so trivial to configure!