After 3 days, 2 vms, a laptop I was about to format, there seems to be an issue with the latest edition of Visual Studio Community (17.13.0).

What I had to do was completely uninstall visual studio, then run the uninstall tool. After that, I downloaded visual studio again from the microsoft site, but instead of executing the exe, I opened command prompt, navigated to the exe, and ran VisualStudioSetup.exe --channelUri https://aka.ms/vs/17/release.LTSC.17.8/channel

This allowed me to install Community Version 17.8 which does not have the issue.