RKE2 extracts the rancher/rke2-runtime image out to disk to provide the core host binaries and packaged manifests, without using a container runtime. If the files get corrupted for some reason, you can try deleting /var/lib/rancher/rke2/data and it will re-extract them. This is safe to do, as only the binaries and stock manifests are in that dir - nothing relating to the running cluster.