Creating new blank project freezes at 80%

This seems to be an editor bug. I had it and found a workaround: when the editor stops on 80%, kill the Editor process in task manager, then kill UnrealBuildTool (in this order, if you kill build tool first uproject file will be deleted). Go to project folder, right click uproject file and choose “Generate Project Files”.

After generating project files, solution can be opened in Visual Studio and compiled from there.