starting nvim ends up in blank screen

Recently updated vim-startify to latest (ver f2fc118) and now when starting neovim (v0.4.4) the screen just stays blank for minutes; feels like it's blocking; generally it finally loads, but as said it takes a crazy amount of time.

In one of the shells I managed to see the following message (which gave it away the plugin I needed to disable):

startify: Pattern '/.git/' threw an exception. Read :help g:startify_skiplist

Only config I have is this:

let g:startify_bookmarks = [
    \ $HOME . "/.config/nvim/init.vim", $HOME . "/.config/nvim/init.first.vim",
    \ $HOME . "/.config/nvim/init.last.vim", $HOME . "/.config/nvim/nvim.plugins"
    \ ]
let g:startify_custom_header = [
    \ '   Author:               laur89',
    \ '   Original vimconf:     http://github.com/timss/vimconf',
    \ ''
    \ ]

mhinz / vim-startify

starting nvim ends up in blank screen #444