Hi, Nick.
First, to answer your earlier question, I was previously able to set up sites on Local. I can’t quite pinpoint when the trouble began…possibly sometime in May. I’m having a slightly different problem with my other local dev environment, Laragon, and don’t know whether it’s for the same reason.
I’m not running any AV except Windows Defender, but it’s possible that updates to that or to other aspect of Windows have changed some security settings. Local appears to be able to access the hosts file (I checked it and the new site name was there), but not to install WP and the database, particularly the database. I will look at the routing post and also check the Laragon forum. If I find the answer, I’ll post it here.