SD card reader crashes system when empty or unmountable card is inserted

I was drafting a multi-paragraph tutorial for you on how to better utilize the Raspberry Pi 4 when my whole system went down due to me plugging in an SD card… 🤬😂

Jokes and jaded emotions aside, if you insert an empty “micro SD to SD” card adapter into the SD card reader, the whole system crashes and it will boot loop until you remove it. I suspect this also applies to SD cards that aren’t empty but have an issue with mounting. This is what happened to me. I plugged it in to view some config files to reference in my tutorial and “WAM!” Whole thing crashed and it started boot looping.

This is a completely reproducible error as well. I am on a Hewlett Packard laptop with a built-in SD card module.