MacBook Air stuck on startup screen

MacBook Air (2017) running Mojave has worked perfectly until a couple of weeks ago when it started lagging and freezing. It's now stuck on the startup screen (apple logo + full progress bar). I tried to startup in safe mode but got stuck on the same startup screen. I was able to enter recovery mode, and ran first aid on internal volume, container, then disk (APPLE SSD SM0256G Media), with no problems reported. I verified that there is enough disk space, checked that SMART status is verified, reset the SMC, reset NVRAM, and ran apple diagnostics which had no problems. I reinstalled Mojave successfully, but still got stuck on the same startup screen. The only other idea I could find was to enter Terminal and force safe mode startup using the command: sudo nvram boot-args="-x" but this is unknown territory for me so I decided to post here first to ask for advice.