I also had this problem - on a 2016 MBP with touchbar. Not only did I have this problem after an upgrade, but about a week after doing a fresh install of High Sierra on this machine, the same thing happened again.
I took the machine to the genius bar and they confirmed the filesystem and hardware were performing normally. Prohibitory symbol remained and would occasionally boot-up after going into recovery mode. But safe mode never helped. This leads me to believe there is something wrong with APFS, which is mandatory for SSD's (something we both have in common). In my case, I choose to use APFS (Encrypted).
When doing the upgrade, the recovery mode to install a fresh macOS is also updated, so there's no way to go back unless you have the media for an older OS or go to the genius bar - they can boot virtually any macOS version from across their network.
The genius bar ended up performing a fresh install of Sierra (10.12.6) on this machine and it's been fine ever since. I'll be waiting for 10.13.2 or 10.13.3 before I even think about upgrading this machine again. I don't think APFS has been tested all that well and the tools that can potentially find issues with it, don't seem to work that well - since everything reported back as being fine, when in reality it wasn't.