I believe we are talking about the same folder. It's the one where it's documents> Electronic Arts> Sims 4>etc. Previously, I moved it and had it regenerated. Before you reached out, I did a clean uninstall (of both Sims 4 and the EA app) (found an article on the forums) while waiting for help and reinstalled the entire game. And it regenerated. And currently, there is a folder called "scratch" in the save folder. I found an article saying that it's due to its failure to launch. I'll attach the DXDiag below. Thanks so much for the help. I'm fully at wits' end.
Because I backed up my old saves and mods already, that folder has been empty this entire time. I have been just trying to get the game to run vanilla before adding the saves and sims back in. And then adding cc/mods. They are all on my desktop. (And also backed up on an external drive)
I am still getting the error.