@SDRausty Could you try upgrading to the latest version (which is 1:5.2.0-2) of qemu-user-i386 package? These are chances that your issue was related to termux/termux-packages#6172 which should be fixed now.

Hello, I had exactly same issue for running ubuntu through proot on
Linux localhost 3.4.113-lineageos armv7l Android 10

Now I'm terribly sorry for the form of this message as this is the first time I'm actually writing a comment on GitHub and I have no idea on markup(?) syntax either.

It turned out that tar was not able to extract the root fs .tar.gz/xz files and throwing permission denied for every file when I checked via verbose extraction..

What I did to solve -

Create root fs folder manually and do chmod -R 777 (distro)-fs, chmod +rx (gz/xz file) and extract all the files manually myself and run the startup script (I have used andronix ubuntu 18)

AND

Alongnside it, I compiled proot locally with a patch from this #107 (comment)

Now I have absolutely no expertise or knowledge to say either one worked or both are required. Pls ask me for any details about this as I'm also facing this now regardless of the distro (ubuntu which I manually installed before still works with both local or binary(?) from termux repo but no other ones work)
Thanks for keeping up with me.

Workaround #107 (comment) can be used here (although probably for qemu proot loader could be skipped altogether)