Lightroom Classic wont open. Stuck on 'Reading Preferences'

Help, I have the exact same issue you describe, on my new Apple M1 imac. And here are some of my specs, copied from the crash report.  Did you get anything useful from Adobe? Your one responder, mentions deleting the 'lock' file, if it exists, It does not exist for me.

-Andrew

Process: Adobe Lightroom Classic [1406]
Path: /Applications/Adobe Lightroom Classic/Adobe Lightroom Classic.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Lightroom Classic
Identifier: com.adobe.LightroomClassicCC7
Version: 11.1 (11.1)
Code Type: ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [1]
User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2022-01-04 15:48:50.6900 -0800
OS Version: macOS 12.0.1 (21A559)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: 47E74515-5CA1-5C54-C8C6-DE2889D91808

Time Awake Since Boot: 950 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 CrBrowserMain Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x00000001bbf652c8
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 5 Trace/BPT trap: 5
Terminating Process: exc handler [1406]

Application Specific Information:
Crashing on exception: bad argument #1 to 'update' (string expected, got nil)

Check if a lock file did not get deleated

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-error-catalog-cannot-be-opened-lrcat-lock.html