Hi Ho, (here we go!)
Good point, sir.
IIRC, I saw a post over on the Reaper forum about an earlier version of Native and Reaper having issues because, when the VST3 Native plug-in update was installed, some bits from the previous version were not entirely “cleaned out” by the new installation, which caused Reaper to fall over.
Might be worth the OP investigating if a little more housekeeping is required .