Installer Woes (uncaught exception: Object)

[benjibee]

Describe the bug
Going through the installer on my local machine I'm running into multiple errors that don't provide any user feedback and only result in a uncaught exception: Object showing up in the JavaScript console.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to /installer.php
2. Verify all server settings are valid
3. Click on "Continue to next step"
4. See no errors but an unresponsive page for various reasons… 🤷

Expected behavior
My first issue was not renaming the .htaccess file, which browsing the forums I can see that's a common issue. It's very easy to miss reading through the documentation if you're not familiar with this particular CMS. Second issue was adding a locale other than English as the primary locale. Added de to the index.php file as instructed, clicked "Save" and the button faded out and was given no feedback, saw the familiar uncaught exception on the JavaScript console.

Screenshots

All good here… though perhaps this would be the perfect place to look for that very-much required .htaccess file, no?

Infinite waiting here if you missed that step

Setting German as the locale, and changing the $locale variable as instructed here and then hitting "Save" once again brings us back to zero-feedback and an uncaught exception.

Environment details (please complete the following information):

• Statamic Version 2.11.20
• Fresh Install
• OS: macOS 10.15.4
• Browser: Firefox 76.0.1
• Web Server: Apache 2.4
• PHP Version: 7.3
• Addons installed: None

Additional context
I very much understand that these issues each have their own fixes, but as these are the very first steps getting a project setup, perhaps some user feedback is in order here? Even if the console showed some info about the error that'd be more helpful…