Something I omitted previously that turns out to be pretty important is that there were many messages logged like this:
QSqlDatabase: QSQLITE driver not loaded QSqlDatabase: available drivers: I dug into HelpViewerWidget.py and saw that it was ultimately trying to use a sqlite database and realized those messages were connected to this process, not just part of some other thread. I so happens that I did not have libqt6sql6-sqlite installed. Once that's done Eric7 starts as it should and imports the Eric6 config. I guess there is a missing dependency in the eric package, or somewhere in that chain.
