Otherwise you end up with ‘emacs-daemon’ marked as “started” with
#<unspecified> as its running value, causing an exception (type error)
when attempting to stop it.

> ┌────
> │ 2025-01-12 16:39:26 GNU Shepherd 1.0.0 (Guile 3.0.9, x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)
> │ 2025-01-12 16:39:26 Starting service root...

Nothing stands out here, but this log is much recent than your initial
report.  Is ‘herd status’ still hanging?  IOW, is it 100% reproducible?

Thanks,
Ludo’.