Had this issue & force closed once after letting the computer churn wildly with fans spinning on high for a bit.
Second time around it froze again but without the wild fan acceleration, and started working after a minute.
This is on a Ryzen 7800X3D with a radeon 7900XTX.
I’m guessing it’s similar to when some (amd) graphics setups were black screening on game start for an extended period, until you let them run through some background cache/shader/something maintenance.
So I suspect if you just wait & let it spin for long enough, it should work. How long will probably depend how powerful your setup is. But I’m thinking minutes, not tens of minutes.
Edit: would also explain why the clearing cache etc works… then it just gets to re-cache things from the start, rather than having to go through & correct what’s already there.
Edit: Relogged & had the same issue but this time it still didn’t load second time through after ~5 minutes. Taskmanager had wow using 6.25% of cpu and not responding.
Clearing cache didn’t help.
A buggrabber error did show up while it was lagging out but didn’t get saved… first line of taint log shows buggrabber hitting max errors per second before throttle & then an assortment of other addons following behind.
I disabled Angry Keystones, Auctionator, CraftSim, Minimal Archaeology, No Mats No Make, Oribos Exchange, Tome of Teleportation, World Quest Tracker & WoWthing Collector
And the character loaded instantly after that.
Possibly it was one of those specific addons, possibly just changing which addons were loading was enough.