I figured it out, kind of?Strange. I don’t know, try from the very beginning, maybe you did something wrong. Delete the game folder, unpack everything again and do the same. I can't advise anything more, because... I didn't have such a problem. My problem was solved through the task manager. Start experimenting. If you find a solution, leave it here for posterity.
I fixed it by re-doing the entire process on my main drive (the one my OS is on). Prior to this, I was doing it on a storage hard drive. I did the exact same steps as my other 50 attempts, but this one was on the main drive, and it worked.
To add to this, I was able to transfer the patched folder into my storage drive--it still works after the transfer.
Thanks for going back and forth with me, kept me troubleshooting!
EDIT: For future reference, if this doesn't fix it, I also deleted all of my AppData files that had the word "elulu" in them before doing this.