After several days of troubleshooting and going through every single option in the game, I discovered an issue: the game will experience issues with crashing no matter what you try unless you set shader quality from high to low.
Seriously, that's all you have to do. Unfortunately this means potato graphics since shader quality is probably the setting with the biggest boost to fidelity.
EDIT: Also, had the same crash message issue after changing from Nvidia to AMD. I ended up having to reinstall windows to fix that particular issue.
