How to remove Google Chrome error popup - "your preferences cannot be read..." on Ubuntu?

I opened the folder .config/google-chrome to do as suggested in Tim's answer and happened to notice a file "Local State" whose group and owner was root and the file had a date stamp of the day since when the problem had started.

I changed the group and owner to self and the error got resolved.

Try the following command:

mv .config/google-chrome/Default .config/google-chrome/Default.org

That will move your config files to a backup file, and should get rid of the problem. Then you can sign into chrome again to get everything back.

My pronouns are He / Him