I figured it out and the env var was related. I searched where LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME was defined and found it in
/etc/profile.d/libva.sh
/etc/profile.d/libva.csh
Then I did pacman -Ss libva and noticed that libva-nvidia-driver was not installed. I installed it, automatically removing libva-vdpau-driver which according to the arch wiki …
The code for libva-vdpau-driver has not been touched for years. It causes crash when running VLC or OBS with recent versions of the NVIDIA driver. [2] If you need a translation layer for NVIDIA drivers, use libva-nvidia-driver instead.
Got my programs back 