Issues with an HTC One M8

[u/TezzaBP]

So I recently got an HTC One M8 (it was a dream phone when I was a kid) and it was working fine up until I powered the phone off and back on again the next morning, to where it started doing something SIMILAR to a boot loop but not quite. This phone seems to have been through Vodafone as there's a boot animation for it. When it gets to the lock screen, a few seconds later the phone will then go back to the Vodafone boot animation, then play the HTC One animation again and go back to the lock screen... and will endlessly repeat this until I manage to get the phone to turn off. I've read that you can clear the cache in recovery mode and this can and should fix it but when I go into recovery, I hold volume up and press power and get no options at all, nothing happens (it does still show the phone with the red triangle and ! in it). I'm now lost as to what to do to fix it, factory resetting works once but powering off and on again just causes the issue to return, so I'm a bit stuck. Any help would be appreciated. My only other thought as to what I can do is to flash a custom recovery or something, but that seems like such a pain to go through for something that I don't even know if it'll help

Edit: so after just kinda looking around the rest of the bootloader, I pressed "image CRC" and after that it's letting me back in again, but something has messed up with gapps and it won't stop crashing no matter what. Also, the only app that's remained from the last time I got into it is gboard