WordPress asks to install, but is already installed?

I know this has been resolved many times including here, but I can't figure this out in my case.

I've been using XAMPP for Mac on Mojave and recently, I updated it to the latest version of - 7.3.1.

Anyway all of my WP local instances stopped working, no matter if I go to localhost/template1 or localhost/template2. WordPress always asks to install, but after picking language and then my login I'm getting to a page with countless errors saying [Table 'wp_users' already exists], [Table 'wp_usermeta' already exists] and so forth.

I've checked wp-config.php for every project and the data there seems right, DB_USER, DB_NAME, DB_PASSWORD, DB_HOST,DB_CHARSET, WPLANG are correct. $table_prefix too (default "_wp").

Looks like WP recognises the database after all, upon installation, how can I debug this? Maybe it's related to upgrading PHP and MySQL version?

Thanks!