Out of desperation, I went and purged everything labelled as nvidia on my system.
After rebooting, and nouveau being not blacklisted anymore, I was surprised to see that I had the same issue. Indeed, nouveau was back: $ sudo lsmod | grep video video 45056 1 nouveau I guess I might have targeted the wrong package with "nvidia-driver" and I am sorry for the inconvenience. However, I do not know against which package I should submit this bug. I am sort of lost at the moment because I do know what could have caused this issue, especially so suddenly (maybe the hardware became faulty?) If you have any clue, I would appreciate anything that could point me in the right direction. Cheers, JB