Title. It started happening after i updated my entire system. I had trobule with the icu and harfbuzz packages which were messing with SDDM. After fixing it plasma stopped displaying widgets on my desktop. From what i can tell the widgets are still saved in plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. Heres a video presenting the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNfXVXbevo (sorry for low quality)

Linux 5.15.5-arch1-1 x86_64
plasmashell 5.23.3