MySQL under XAMPP won't start on MacOS - throwing "no such process"

Question

I'm on MacOS (Catalina right now) but the issue has been there for the last couple of years.

XAMPP works great and then all of sudden I can't start MySQL. Only reinstalling XAMPP works every time, but this is really painful as I have many databases to dump. Also I'm a programmer and I became really tired of not knowing whats causing the issue.

So today it happened again and I decided this time I will at least try to figure it out.

MySQL is stuck at "Starting..." and changes to "Stopped" after roughly half a minute:

Trying to start processes from Terminal throws an error, that's kinda disturbing as it says "Starting MySQL...ok." and I'm getting "no such process" only after a few seconds. Looks like MySQL starts but then tries to do something, fails at it and then kills itself?

sh-3.2# ./xampp start
Starting XAMPP for Mac OS X 7.3.7-0...
XAMPP: Starting Apache...ok.
XAMPP: Starting MySQL...ok.
sh-3.2# /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/mysql.server: line 264: kill: (7260) - No such process

I decided to check what's on the 264 line of mysql.server and confirmed using echo that mysql runs that:

elif kill -0 $! ; then
  :  # mysqld_safe is still running

And here's the whole method:

wait_for_ready () {

  i=0
  while test $i -ne $service_startup_timeout ; do

    if $bindir/mysqladmin ping >/dev/null 2>&1; then
      log_success_msg
      return 0
    elif kill -0 $! ; then
      :  # mysqld_safe is still running
    else
      # mysqld_safe is no longer running, abort the wait loop
      break
    fi

    echo $echo_n ".$echo_c"
    i=`expr $i + 1`
    sleep 1

  done

  log_failure_msg
  return 1
}

Again, I'm not into desvops much but I'm pretty damn sure I should fall into first "if" and somehow I'm ending up in the "elif".

I tried these:

• restarting computer,
• changing mysql ports in /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/etc/my.cnf to anything else than 3305/3306,
• scanning localhost ports and processes (there are NO other instances of MySQL running).

And nothing.

I've been googling the issue with "no such process" for an hour but without luck as well.

What's going on here and how could I fix that? Is there a way to go deeper and debug it properly? I feel like kill -0 $! tries to kill something that is not initiated yet and this wrecks the whole process, though I'm still not sure why.

Thanks a lot for any hints.