Thanks for the suggestion, LeTanuki91!
I did a few tests with downgrading and upgrading my Nvidia drivers between 576.02 and 576.28 I found that the game would launch only during the driver upgrade process, which is odd haha. But the test definitely suggests that the driver could be related to my runtime crash.
After playing around with the drivers, I am able to get the game to launch somewhat reliably now. But hopefully the game is able to launch with some more stability when new drivers are released in the future
I understand this issue a bit more now. I have learnt that the reason the game can launch while a Nvidia driver upgrade is in progress is because the Nvidia driver is temporarily disabled.
To further verify this I opened Windows Device Manager, navigated to "Display adapters," right-clicked on my NVIDIA device, and select "Disable device". This forced my PC to launch the game with my AMD graphics driver. Which confirms the RTX 5080 is the main issue
