I just had a chat with Apple support
Their answer, which I'm not inclined to believe, is that because the error msg didn't resolve with a clean install it must be a hardware issue, and because it's on a 2015 MacBook Pro I'm 'on my own'.
I mentioned that other users have experienced the same issue starting at the same time (I (provided the link to this thread) and the answer was that "[these users] may be sharing the same issue with others with that same Mac model, which indicates hardware issues.
It's seems to strange to me that this issue, that appears to never been reportsd before (according to a Google search), suddenly manifests itself on several machines.