For those who still care, I did a full reinstall on my more powerful desktop ( i3-13100F, GTX1060, 32GByte RAM, 500 GByte HDD ) and I have been able to launch the game and load the Jita station interior. I tried to undock in a rookie ship, but i did not see the grid load until I was about 60km from the undock. I changed the client setting from on demand to full download and that seemed to help, but every time I jump a gate the client freezes. Somehow EVE Online in the new launher era is worse than it was on Pop OS at the start of the year.
I also tried PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 %command% and that does significantly reduce the CPU load, but the client textures look to be very low resolution and are all messed up ( a magenta artifacting like they are not loading ) and does nothing to fix the ‘getting stuck on gate’ issue.