In game soft lock in story mode - NFW unbound

I'd really like to enjoy the game I bought the way I like to play games with story mode, by playing the story mode with progression, but it is been an infuriating experience with this game.

I'm trying to play the game in casual mode and until now I was only able to enter the garage by being caught on purpose by the police.

I'm playing with a rig with a Ryzen 5700g + rx6700xt + Aorus Elite b450 + 32 GB ram 3200mhz + focus 80+ gold PSU with W11 and it looks like the garage/safe houses are simply locked after racing with some heat. I can't enter them with heat levels between 0.5 and 5, the message "0 enter garage" is displayed and I can't participate in daily completion events/objectives either since they also display the message "0 to participate".

The loophole here that is making this experience disgusting is that evading the cops doesn't reduce heat level and I end up locked up obtaining more money from evading cops without being able to end my daily session or store the obtained money to progress in the game by entering the garage.

The only way I found to end daily sessions was to be caught by cops but that always resulted in a calendar-day progression with all the money arrested leaving me without being able to progress in the story.

This also happens on the last update.

Is this a bug, in-game soft lock or am I missing some configuration to be able to enjoy the game in story mode?