When loading minecraft on the latest release of sodium all of the text turns into box characters and the game closes/crashes when joining a game, could anyone help?

You need to update Iris. Most mods that interact with Sodium break when Sodium updates.

It is an Iris Shaders issue, try to remove Iris Shaders, it should work (had the exact same issue)

Do you use owo lib?

It is an Iris Shaders issue, try to remove Iris Shaders, it should work (had the exact same issue)

Thanks! it worked!

So since you've removed or updated Iris and this issue is fixed, can you please close your issue?

I had same issue and can verify that updating Iris Shaders does indeed fix the issue.