I've been trying for the last few hours to fix my friend's minecraft installation due to this error:

After a very long time trying different fixes, none of them working, my friend mentioned that Minecraft had been working fine until recently, so I tried to load the game on 1.16.5, and it worked perfectly fine

This means that this is an issue that was introduced in 1.17

We also tried the 1.17.1 preview 1, however this didn't work either

Please try to fix this soon, and if there are any logs or anything you need, please ask