What helped me was to add systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0 to my GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in the grub file (/etc/default/grub for Debian). After this, run update-grub.
I think this happened because the newer kernel is using cgroups v2 by default whereas the CRI I had (containerd I guess older version?) did not support it. Anyways, once I did that and rebooted my system it worked! Hope this helps someone (or me in the future).