well nc 12.x is outdated by far and thus a major security-issue for your and your users. afaik nextcloud releases all known security glitches of outdated versions only a few weeks after they reached their EOL. so it’s no abstract thread you’re facing. it’s a real problem.
thus i’d recommend to upgrade your instance asap. the only promising way would be… doing it step by step… updating to nc 13 first… and see if there are errors in the admin section that needs to be solved. then nc 14 … after solving all admin.-error messsages --> nc 15 etc.