I did manage to get this working, but I had to tear down my Apple Home and rebuild it from scratch. It wasn't a pleasant solution. But it's been fine on releases ever since.

I didn't look to see a crash, but I am definitely seeing some problems with my widgets in iOS17b3. Many of them don't load, or they disappear and refuse to load again. That's probably the crash you're seeing. The biggest violator appears to be the Fitness widget. The iMessage widget for regular contacts also does not load. I removed it and tried to re-add it, but it appears to be missing entirely. I suspect there are some problems with widgets in this release for sure. Some of the other widgets had a similar issue until I removed them and re-added them.