Endless login to a character in chaos trial (PoE 2)

I've got a character, that I tried doing chaos ascendency trial with yesterday.
Today I cannot login to that particular character (Alione). I'm stuck at login screen to "The Temple of Chaos": gears are turning infinitely.

What I've tried:
- run Steam "check local files"
- restart PC
- create new character and confirmed: I can log in to the new character without any issues

If that helps with the problem, I was playing yesterday with the controller and encountered a few crashes changing back to WASD, but I do not suppose this is the root cause.

Thanks to this thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3655373 I realised PoE2 might have more graphical issues, than I anticipated.

Either way, what I did:
- I reinstalled GeForce driver fresh (clean installation, not the express one)
- I changed DX12 to Vulkan
and that was all it took to finally log in.