DISM in a broken state on a barely used installation.

So the new updates last month included an update that patches the recovery partition, this has caused me multiple problems on different machines, but this post is about one specific issue.

The machine in question I observed is failing the current cumulative update within a few seconds. It does this whether via windows update in settings, or trying to install standalone.

I did some investigating, and noticed DISM seems completely broken.

Not only does the restorehealth command fail but so does scanhealth. DISM cant even scan for problems.

It fails at 4.9% of the scan with a very vague generic "Error: 2"

I am expecting this to need an OS reinstall, but curious if it can be saved.