Error: Variable 'entry' does not exist - When adding homepage or other entry with URL
After trying many different things I noticed that the background tasks que was backed up:



The queue was not moving. After a little research I came across the support ticket on craft on how to Resolve "Stuck" Background Tasks. After completing the couple steps of updating the stuck task status and restarting the queue, they all cleared out.

After this, my homepage was pulling in the entry properly and parsing the 'entry' variable without issue.

My guess is that if you create an entry while the background tasks queue is stuck you will run into this issue.