unicorn I have the same behaviour with a Aorus Elite v2 motherboard. When I have a USB-c SSD connected, it changes the device order. Any device on it causes da0 to be occpupied, even without a visible volume. After the kernel, the system seems to forget the device we're booted from and drops to the post-kernel bootmenu where you have to give the /dev entry of the partition, which was different before the kernel loaded. I think it's obfuscation of what should be considered the PC-standard for device priority.
I have a similar thing with a old Acer laptop with a SD-cardreader. Even if there's no card in it, da0 still exists, so any external bootdevice that is added becomes da1 in all cases. A default FreeBSD install doesn't get this properly.
This would actually require a type of conditional expression in the fstab file. Don't know if that's possible...