Thanks Jeff. The older kernel images showed in the specs because I had booted from an older image. But earlier in the day itself I had done a full upgrade with the --refresh option. That’s when something broke, I don’t know what exactly.
Since Fedora is my daily driver, I had to resort to a rather cumbersome “solution” - I reinstalled Fedora afresh, and then performed a system upgrade. The problem does not recur for now. I will give it a few days to see if it does.