[2020] Load Screen Crash, First time boot up, No mods., no DLC

My best guess would be you're running out of RAM. 8 GB should be enough for just the basegame, but with stuff running in the background, that might be it. Did you have a popup mentioning a folder (numbers as the name)? That will have log files that can tell us what caused the crash.

If it is running out of RAM, then increasing the pagefile to 16 or 32 GB will do the trick yes.