Excellent. Thank you. My apologies. I should have included that i was running VeraCrypt 1.26.14 and macFUSE 4.8.0, but both from brew. I've now installed the recommended fuse-t (https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t) as i'm running an M2 machine. The brew package for VC 1.26.14 relies on and installs the macFUSE 4.8.0 nonetheless. I went to the VC website (https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Downloads.html) and installed the fuse-t-compatible version of VC and everything works properly again. Thank you...
MacFUSE - unsupported operating system.
i just tried it and it reports an issue using MacFUSE. More later if i find anything.