I don’t know enough to solve this (I’m doing a lot of guessing here), but if you are using an emulator (such as QEMU), then sometimes the order of installing the qemu-user-static package can change things. I have no idea if this is the problem or not.
Also, note that nvpmodel.service is part of the standard NVIDIA installation related to power control. That means it accesses “/proc” content for either examining or changing driver settings (each file there is really a driver pretending to be a file, and not a real file on disk). Not having the NVIDIA kernel would result in not having the ability for nvpmodel.service to function. This might also be related to device tree since some wiring has multiple possible function, and differs across different carrier boards (e.g., it might work on a dev kit, but fail on a third party carrier board until the correct device tree is used).