I’m glad you got it working!
Usually this sort of thing can happen if the VM has been running for a long time and is having problems turning on. This can be due to folders not mounting cleanly or some other issue within the VM, like a docker container going belly up. I’ve also seen issues when using a VPN which makes the SSL certificate for the VM not be recognized by Local.
Anyway, my guess is that either restarting the VM flushed things out, or toggling Faster Docker Volumes re-set the file mounts with the VM – so great job trying those things out, they’re the things I would recommend in these kinds of situations.
I guess the big thing to note is that this sort of thing should become less of an issue when Local Lightning is released later this year!