I can't reproduce this.
It is possible that your installation to LaTeX is messed up and this caused R Markdown to fail.
You can try compiling a latex file if you know how.
Otherwise, if you are willing to, you can easily reinstall a clean version of TinyTeX using tinytex:::reinstall_tinytex() or tinytex:::install_tinytex() if you don't have TinyTeX already as a LaTeX distribution.
Without being able to reproduce, it is hard for me to know more. And I don't think this is an issue with knitr or rmarkdown but rather with LaTeX - you can google the error for LaTeX specific issue maybe.