I believe to some extent I have narrowed down the resolution, however, I am not able to resolve the issue. The problem also happens when library(shiny) is used.
Have you recently updated to R 3.5.1 from R <= 3.4.X? If you have installed precompiled libraries with apt from system console under R <= 3.4.X, try removing those with sudo apt remove -y 'r-cran-*' and reinstalling with the new version of R, also, make sure that all your other libraries are up to date update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE)