When my console boots up none of the games/apps work at all. I've tried resetting it...

Hi Nathan! I'm Rostom, an Independent Advisor. I will be glad to help you here. This is not the situation I want you to be in. No worries, we will do our best now to get this sorted out.

Our best option here is to perform an offline system update. During the procedure, when you’re on the Xbox startup troubleshooter page, you may try to reset your console first by removing everything. If it does the same thing, please proceed with the offline system update.

To use the Offline System Update, you'll need:
A Windows-based PC with an Internet connection and a USB port
A USB flash drive with a minimum 6 GB of space formatted as NTFS

Please check the detailed instructions here:
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-ne...

Try to perform a software reset without removing games or apps: https://beta.support.xbox.com/help/hardware-network/console/reset-console-to-factory-defaults

I've tried just about every form of resetting/power cycling possible, and none of them permanently solved the problem. Like I said, the only solutions I found were either choosing to restart the console, or letting the console boot before connecting my external
HDD.

Have you tried to remove the external hard drive and then soft reset the console? To do that, just go to settings, console, press reset. Make sure to select to keep all your games and apps and then turn it back on. Once it has booted up, put the external
hard drive back and see if it works then.

i've tried reseting windows store cache, uninstalling and downloading the game again, updated my grapichs drivers, logged out of the xbox app and in again. And none of that worked

Or did you tried only this?
"I've also tried clearing cache, I clean booting my pc, and checked hardware requirements."

Besides these I've also tried repairing and resetting the app in settings, checked, for available updates, and changed my language pack to English (United States); but none of those have worked.

I just tried switching from a D: drive to a C: drive, as I did have it installed on C:, but it continues to do the same thing.