This behavior indicates you uploaded a sketch to the Nano ESP32 board while you had "Debug mode (Hardware CDC)" selected from Arduino IDE's Tools > USB Mode menu. This "hardware CDC" configuration is required for some specific advanced use cases (example), but otherwise the default "TinyUSB" configuration makes the board a bit easier to use.
Did you intentionally configure the board in "hardware CDC" mode? If so, do you still need it to be in this mode?
I'm glad you were able to solve the problem. Thanks for taking the time to post an update.
In the future, when you make a modification to the platform configuration files, I recommend carefully noting that, as it can lead to quite some confusing behavior as you learned. You can add comments to the boards.txt file by starting the line with a # character.