Zorin OS stuck on blank screen and blinking cursor on boot after changing the PATH variable

I've googled and tried out all the ways but in typical IT fashion, none of them worked T_T. I have Windows 11 and Zorin 16 dual boot on my Lenovo Legion 5, on separate disks (windows is 500GB, Zorin is on a 250gb ssd). I was trying to set up a java environment on Zorin, and accidentally changed and saved the changed PATH variable (which if anyone here has installed java on linux means what I was supposed to put in JAVA_HOME, I put in PATH accidentally and saved that). A bit nervous about that I looked up solutions. Apparently rebooting the system would reset the PATH to the default value. So I rebooted into Zorin. Voila, blank screen with blinking cursor. I have tried to "drop into command line", but in one case I just couldn't get past the "login" command that the command line brought up (I *know* the passwords because I was literally just using them to use the system some minutes back, so that cannot be the issue). In another case when I tried 'Advanced Options for Zorin' and booted into the recovery menu, I tried to go the command line method from there. Nothing changed on rebooting. Then I tried all the options on recovery menu (clear logs, update grub, etc). Nothing worked even then. Many solutions ask me to do something with gdm3 but when I typed in those commands in my command line in the Zorin recovery menu, the system said gdm3 is not installed. I really don't want to have to reinstall Zorin again and want to solve this issue. Any help would be appreciated a lot T_T_T_T.