Thank you for this @ptillisch post#35. Deleting manually the drivers from the Device Manager and reinstalling them manually from a downloaded file fixed my problem.
I was using a Sparkfun ESP32 S2 board with a CP210 processor. I wanted to use to transmit audio, but figured out the baud rate was not high enough, so I set it from the dropdown menu to 2000000. That seemed to have broken something in the board because after uploading that code, the Serial Monitor would not connect to the COM port anymore and the baud rate DD menu disappeared from the GUI. The only way to make it reappear was to open the Serial Plotter, which also refused to connect. Even so, after the DD menu reappeared, I could not change the baud rate by clicking on any value. Obviously I had changed the baud rate in the code serial.begin() line.
The strange this was that I was able to upload code to the board even after that. I tried connecting a spare ESP32-S3 board I had to see if the baud rate problem would repeat, but it was not the case. The board and baud rate were fine. I tried connecting the malfunctioned ESP32-S2 board to a different computer and Arduino would not even see its COM port. I bought another ESP32-S2 board, same make and model, and connected it to my laptop and the problem reappeared even on the fresh board. I tried following instructions from another post about uninstalling the IDE and deleting any related registers and that did not work either, even after reinstalling the IDE and restarting my laptop several times.
But this finally fixed it. I followed the instructions adjusted for the CP210 driver and now it works. Thank you! Saved me a week of work!