Buffer~ Has Suddenly Stopped Working

I have a Macbook Pro m2 where I've been developing some Max for Live devices. All week, the devices have worked perfectly. Suddenly, on Friday, something changed and I wasn't able to play audio as I normally do. I identified a new buffer~ error message in the Max Window.

buffer~: cannot open parser for this file

This has worked perfectly for years and suddenly nothing. I tried everything I could think of. Wav files. M4a files. And then I opened the help file and the buffer~ object throws this error on the help example!

Now I've tried to delete and reinstall Max and Ableton (with a clean sweep of prefs). I've tried to enable full disk access on Max and Ableton. I thought it might be a Max update that broke buffer~ but the latest version of Ableton Live comes bundled with Max 8.3.3 and the aforementioned error is showing up there. It happens on standalone Max as well as in Ableton bundled.

I'm pulling my hair out. I'm almost certain my buffer~ object is corrupt but I don't know how to go about verifying that. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Otherwise I'm going to nuke my hard drive as I don't know of anything else to try.