Weird bug in Sequoia 15.7.1 and now 15.7.2

This started a few weeks ago. I noticed that the 'quick look' behaviour had changed. When I select several images, and tap space bar, it SHOULD bring up a large window with the first image, and if I select play, it would play a slideshow. Now, it only brings up a blue box around the finder window containing the selects, and if I tap space again, it DESELECTS the images, and OPENS the top most one in Preview.

I noticed similar weirdness happening in other apps, and finder items. This seems to be spreading throughout my system. Today I am using VS code to try and write some unit tests for a Go course, and it too is doing the 'blue box' thing when I hit the spacebar, and it sometimes will lock up the screen, so that no characters can be typed, unless I click off to another app and then come back. I may be able to get a few characters written before it decides to 'blue box' me again, and essentially hang my cursor, and not allow any further input unless I click off and click back.

This is a deal breaker, my productivity is down to zero on this mac, and I will have to switch to my Linux machine to continue.

This is a mac mini m4 machine, and has been working fine since January, until the .7.1 update to OS 15. I have contacted Apple support twice about this, and they opened a ticket, and shared that other users are reporting this same behaviour, but they offered no solutions. I updated my system to .7.2 and the behaviour persists.

I am worried that I have picked up a virus or something deliberate on my machine, and I am reluctant to 'salt' my time machine with a possibly infected backup.

Apple is moving at a glacial pace on this bug, and I don't know how many affected users there are. If you have any suggestions on how I can reset my machine safely, I would welcome that. Specifically, if I do add the current snapshot to the time machine vault, and it somehow IS compromised by malicious code, Will it be possible to re-install a previous backup that would NOT be corrupted?

If it is NOT corrupted, then do you feel that re-installing from Time Machine will bring back the same issues?

I am stuck here, and my machine is almost useless now.

Also, if I do nuke and pave my machine, and re-install osx 15 from scratch, will this even help? I am so stumped right now.