Fascinating - your suggestion and my hunch combined proved to be the solution!
I categorically knew that it was not a non-standard world type, so I had a browse through the NBT and just deleted out the compactmachines:compact_world tree data, as it's a remnant of a long-uninstalled (but very cool) mod, that left it's data in the NBT. Then I deleted everything from the "dimensions" folder in %appdata%/.minecraft/ without deleting the folder itself.
To my great relief, the world has succesfully loaded in 1.18.2, meaning I don't need to lose my most worked-on world to version incompatibility!
I'm not sure what the exact issue was, I just know it pertains to Compact Machines and something to do with how the 1.16.5->1.18.2 update treats it's dimensions. I imagine even after deleting the mod itself, it probably left the dimensions themselves (with machines inside) intact. To anyone encountering this/a similar issue, check if you have non-standard modded dimensions, especially those you don't use anymore. Seems to do the trick.
Thanks for the help! ❤️