alpine email client 2.22 gmail error BAD Client aborted AUTHENTICATE command

I'm on ubuntu 20.04 and use alpine as my email client for gmail. About a week ago I had to change the authentication method from user-password to xoauth2 due to gmail disabling secure apps (meaning I have to set up an id and secret). This worked fine till today when I got this error message:

IMAP protocol error: Client aborted AUTHENTICATE command.

Runing alpine with debug options give me this:

02:54:10.270683
 609   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:10.270683: * OK Gimap ready for requests from 200.126.96.24 f10mb126061768oov
 610   │ 
 611   │ 02:54:10.270814
 612   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:10.270814: 00000000 CAPABILITY
 613   │ 
 614   │ 02:54:10.399210
 615   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:10.399210: * CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA ID XLIST CHILDREN X-GM-EXT-1 
       │ XYZZY SASL-IR AUTH=XOAUTH2 AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=PLAIN-CLIENTTOKEN AUTH=OAUTHBEARER AUTH=XOAUTH
 616   │ 
 617   │ 02:54:10.399329
 618   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:10.399329: 00000000 OK Thats all she wrote! f10mb126061768oov
 619   │ 
 620   │ 02:54:10.399947
 621   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:10.399947: 00000001 AUTHENTICATE XOAUTH2
 622   │ 
 623   │ 02:54:10.529686
 624   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:10.529686: + 
 625   │ 
 626   │ 02:54:16.085145
 627   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:16.085145: *
 628   │ 
 629   │ 02:54:16.215203
 630   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:16.215203: 00000001 BAD Client aborted AUTHENTICATE command. f10mb126061768oov
 631   │ 
 632   │ 02:54:16.215320
 633   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:16.215320: 00000002 LOGOUT
 634   │ 
 635   │ 02:54:16.345417
 636   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:16.345417: * BYE Logout Requested f10mb126061768oov
 637   │ 
 638   │ 02:54:16.345567
 639   │ IMAP DEBUG 02:54:16.345567: 00000002 OK Quoth the raven, nevermore... f10mb126061768oov

Looking around in google haven't give me any hints so far as to what the issue can be. Also, I can't access alpine site (https://alpine.x10host.com/) . The important stuff of .pinerc are:

smtp-server : smtp.gmail.com:465/ssl/auth=xoauth2/user=user@gmail.com
           inbox-path : {imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/auth=xoauth2/user=user@gmail.com}INBOX
     postponed-folder : {imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/auth=xoauth2/user=user@gmail.com}[GMAIL]/Drafts

I also tried the smtp-server with tls and port 587. EDIT: Kind of testing out, I deleted .pine-passfile to do the authorization again. That worked, meaning I can access gmail now, but I have to re-do the whole process every time since there is no .pine-passfile created now.... Any ideas?