Pi looks in to the first partition in the boot process, it reads the cmdline to know where to find the rootfs. We need to change in the SSD /etc/fstab so that we mount the SD boot partition for the firmware updates.
console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=4811dfd1-02 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait
root@pi4fr:/boot# cat /etc/fstab proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 PARTUUID=738a4d67-01 /boot vfat defaults 0 2
root@pi4fr:/boot# blkid /dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="4BBD-D3E7" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="738a4d67-01" /dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="45e99191-771b-4e12-a526-0779148892cb" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="738a4d67-02" /dev/sda1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="3FFE-CDCA" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="4811dfd1-01" /dev/sda2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="3122c401-b3c6-4d27-8e0d-6708a7613aed" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="4811dfd1-02" /dev/mmcblk0: PTUUID="738a4d67" PTTYPE="dos" root@pi4fr:/boot#