I am not able to advise on your error, so can only offer an alternative path to enable you to proceed while waiting for a better answer.
if that was the case I suspect it would be happening to more people
Most people are using a cloud service (as recommened by Jeremy in the course so you can focus on machine learning rather than sysadmin). You should try one. I’ve had success with Paperspace using GitHub - bencoman/paperspace-setup: Setup a paperspace instance for fastai, which evolved out of the Live coding walkthrough Live-coding (aka walk-thrus) ✅. The walkthroughs might also help with your local install.