Arch Linux – Resolving ^@ Spam in TTY

I recently noticed some weird behavior on my GNU/Linux machine. I've been trying to narrow it down but I am unsure where to go next. My setup uses the following:

• i3
• gdm
• arch
• systemd
• grub2
• pulseaudio
• 4.13.3-1-ARCH

Here is how it manifests iself:

• when trying to resize panes in i3 (alt+right click and hold) the action will be randomly canceled (happens on key presses)
• alt+dragging windows meets a similar fate
• booting to tty periodically adds ^@s to the login prompt, I'd estimate them to be ~0.5s intervals
• in tty I can see those being passed to vim when I open the command bar (:)
• using a pager like less in tty mode and searching with / will result in (?) being spammed
• htop's search (/) is instantly canceled by the periodic keypress
• holding a key and trying to have it be repeated (such as holding space) will stop the other occurrences from happening (e.g. only one or two happen)
• any tooltip (such as chrome tooltips) get instantly closed because of key presses

Here is what I have tried:

• tried switching DE temporarily (gnome, cinnamon, xfce)
• tried killing programs one by one until I was left with a tty session and essentially systemd services + pulseaudio
• tried booting on an arch livecd – problem does not manifest
• overriding grub2 with init=/bin/bash drops me into a shell where the problem does not manifest
• I have tried pressing all keys to verify it wasn't a hardware problem, however previous steps point to it not being hardware
• I have made a diff of dmesg, from the init=/bin/bash and the regular boot – the main difference seems to be systemd being started in the regular boot
• Made a diff of lsmod from init=/bin/bash and regular boot, tried to rmmod modules that seemed related

My system is up to date, I'm not quite sure what other steps I can do to track this down. Any other debugging tips?