Suddenly unable copy files between folders

[stuffdone]

Yesterday for some reason my phone became incapable of moving or copying files between locations. I noticed this using gallery to organize albums. I tried with different gallery apps as well. I also tried with Astro file manager.

I get this error which does not return any search results other than pages about avoiding that error when programming in Kotlin. Not a single post about a user resolving this sudden malfunction.

kotlin.KotlinNullPointerException

I really REALLY do not want factory reset and have to reinstall everything from scratch.