An update should not take 12+ hours. Full stop. Especially on the system I was updating - only four years old and with a SSD (I would have been more patient if the hardware was older and/or I was using a 'traditional' hard drive)*. I'm glad it finally resolved for you, but stalling out at 61% for an hour or more is not an acceptable update/upgrade experience.
Also, as I noted in my post ... in Event Viewer, it was logged that the update to 20H2 failed (without any obvious notification provided). So, it is not likely it would have resolved for me regardless of how long I waited. Waiting for an hour at 61% is more than enough time to ascertain something is amiss.
* I will also note, I have another *10* year old laptop (XPS15) that got updated from 1909 to 2004 and then 20H2 within days of each release. Even the major update from 1909 to 2004 only took a total of 2.5 hours on this antiquated systems, and never did it get 'stuck' at a particular point for more than 15-20 minutes. Can you imagine if an Android or iOS update meant you could not use your device for a 12+ hour block of time? No one would tolerate that.
The real issue here is though - I did not try to force the update. The update was offered. That implies the upgrade block for the Conexant driver issue was resolved (at least for my system's configuration), and I should expect a smooth upgrade without having to go through the steps I went to to resolve. This is Microsoft bug, and they need to get this sorted out before mainstream support for 1909 ends in less than a month! Clearly, I was not the only one for whom the block was lifted only to find the update failed (without user intervention).