XeLaTeX Compiler Issue - "file not found"

I have a rather strange problem at the moment with regards to using the XeLaTeX compiler in the MiKTeX distribution. I am currently running everything up to date (TeXMaker 5.0.4, MiKTeX 21.6 with no further updates due to be installed).

For a couple of years I have been using the Plasmati Graduate CV template (https://www.latextemplates.com/template/plasmati-graduate-cv). This has always compiled perfectly with XeLaTeX with absolutely no errors. I recently updated my MiKTeX distribution after 2 years so that I could run a beamer template (which now works fine). I am unsure exactly how this happened, but I now receive a "file not found" error in TexMaker, much like that which is described in this post: Texmaker (Windows version) – first use – Error: Log file not found!. None of the fixes in this post worked for me, and the directory is still populated with the same auxiliary files as before. The problem would seem to come from producing the .pdf document itself. Opening the file in Adobe Acrobat for example, gives an error that the document has been damaged/corrupted.

I have since reinstalled all associated components multiple times (even reverting to a previous setup of MiKTeX), unfortunately to no avail. I have consulted some of the other posts on SE but none seem to help. My code seems to compile in Overleaf (albeit taking an inexplicably obscene amount of time). The minimal working example would be that associated to the CV template (which is not particularly helpful in this situation).

Any help would be very much appreciated, and I would be happy to give more detail as necessary (such as my backend/quickbuild setup – it is hard to know what would be relevant in this case).

Here is a picture of error message

and here is the error appearing in the log file:

Error 1 (driver return code) generating output;
file cv.pdf may not be valid.