Yesterday I reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows 10. I've tried to reinstall The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection, but every time I try, it either crashes if I skip the intro cutscene or softlocks if I wait through it. It used to be that I had no issues at all with the game crashing even on Windows 10, it just worked flawlessly. No fixes that others suggested have worked for me, as for all of them their issues occured after they chose a neighborhood; I haven't even had the luxury of getting that far.

Try deleting your config folder in documents.

This video got mine working. I just carefully followed all the steps.
https://youtu.be/6BRX0JlN8lM

Unfortunately, I tried everything in that guide and none of it worked for me.

Is there some sort of thing I need to install that's required by The Sims 2? Do I need to install DirectX 9 even if I had DirectX 12?

Have you run Graphics Rules Maker and selected the correct settings? Applied the 4 gig patch? Added the 2 needed D9vk files from https://github.com/Joshua-Ashton/d9vk/releases?

Yup, did all of that. The updated text guide actually said to take out one of those D9vk files since it did more harm than good. But it still crashes after the intro cutscene.

Then your Graphics rules are probably wrong. Post a screenshot of the Graphics Rules Maker window.

I finally got it to work by deleting the folder in Documents. I guess it got stuck while trying to generate Documents files.

I've ran into a new problem where some of the graphics are flickering in and out, but that's a different problem entirely that I'll fix later on.

So it was probably like I said, something in config folder. I had this recently too.

The thing is, I didn't even have a Config folder in Documents. Only folders that were generated were Logs and Teleport, which is why I didn't try out your suggestion immediately.

Oh. That's really weird.