Is my device unrecoverable without factory reset? - com.andoird.phone stopped

Yesterday I took my Xiaomi Mi A2 from my pocket and saw a warning screen (text-only) telling me the device couldnt start and if the issue persisted I might need to do a factory reset and wipe all my data. I clicked try again. After starting, my device displays an error message - "process com.android.phone stopped". When I try to unlock the phone it starts rebooting after a few seconds. When I slide down the top tool bar the device also starts to reboot. I searched for a solution but didn't find a fix that works for me. Some of the suggestions relating to a simmilar issue (but the error message in those cases starts with "Unfortunately" and the devices seem to be somewhat servicable) suggest wiping cache, contacts or SIM tools but all of those are inaccessible to me because the device reboots all the time. Another solution for wiping the cache is using adb command line tool. But adb doesn't "see" devices without USB debugging enabled - which again I can't enable because I cannot access the settings menu (reboots). fastboot seems to be able to delete cache with fastboot erase cache but I'm prevented from doing this because of an error - FAILED (remote: 'Erase is not allowed in Lock State'). I'm not sure if this Lock State gets unlocked with fastboot oem unlock but from what I understand that would wipe my device anyway. Finding all of this out took quite some time so at this point I don't know what else to do as I have very little knowledge about this area. Is there any way to at least attempt to clean the cache or will I have to go for the factory reset? I'm not entirely sure if I have all the Google Authenticator recovery codes so I'm hesitant to do so. I've had an old iPhone 4 for some 4 years and I've never had to invest so much time into that so you can imagine why this frustrates me at this point.