Struggling to troubleshoot permanently crashing Dock, Mission Control, Launchbar
Very Long Story Short
BitBar script for automatically changing desktop background somehow got run without my intent and set my desktop background image to a broken URL string. My desktop background was black so there was no visual change that alerted me to this being the culprit, but looking through ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/, I catted everything inside it just in case and turns out that desktoppicture.db was not gibberish but instead a URL.
This had the effect of keeping the Dock process stuck in limbo, where I could not kill or run it, nor could I actually witness it in any system diagnosis or crash report. It never crashed but it also wasn't running; a ghost.