What's in your gdbinit file, if any?

I ran into a similar error when trying to setup debugging in Clion. The solution was to set the Debugger binary xtensa-esp32-elf-gdb in the Toolchain settings, and then select it in the Run Configuration.

Instead of writing -file-exec-and-symbols build/main.elf in the gdb console just pass the symbol file as command line argument: xtensa-esp32-elf-gdb -x gdbinit ../build/main.elf