Update: a full fresh reinstall solved the problem. Probably just a corrupted game file somewhere.
Every Tuesday morning (EST/PST) WoW gets its weekly reset and often some hotfix or larger patches applied. Today’s weekly reset made the game unplayable, on my system at least.
I can open the Battle.net client, open the game, login to the game server successfully. But when I log into a character, the game crashes 90% of the time before loading into the game world. The 10% of time it successfully loads into the game world, the game crashes a few seconds later, even without me touching any controls. All addons disabled, no prior changes to my system.
Also submitted to Github issues too, just want to see if anyone else having this problem.