AVI files fast forward and freeze in Premiere Pro

Recently I updated my Mac from Sierra to Big Sur and my Premiere Pro from the 2017 version to the most recent 15.2.0.

I film a lot with an old handycam that produces AVI files like this:

Before the update I never had any trouble with this footage in Premiere (it wouldn't play in Quicktime but that never bothered me). Now, after the update, the video of my footage is fast forwarded and at some point frozen, while the audio is fine. I get tons of errors like this:

Error retrieving frame *** at time **:**:**:** from the file ***

After some research I found several solutions:

1. Change the playback engine to Software only

-> This didn't work for me.

2. Delete existing media cache

-> This didn't work for me. I haven't tried assigning a SSD drive as media cache drive, but I don't think my problem has anything to do with cache.

3. Create proxies for the files

-> This didn't work for me. The proxies that Adobe Media Encoder creates have the same problems with fastforwarding and freezing. And most importantly when I do an export the video files are still corrupted.

4. Transcode the files to another format

-> This works for me but it compromises the (already quite poor) quality of the AVI files. I use ffmpeg to do this.

Question is: are there any other possible solutions to this problem?

I've seen people post about downgrading their version of Premiere or Quicktime, but I feel that's only gonna postpone confronting this problem in the long run (as I do want to keep using this little handycam).

Thank you in advance!