Are you getting any bugs in the debug console, if you're launching with it? If so, can you post them here for us to examine?
Without any errors being shown, I can make a few guesses at what happened. Have you changed the name of the mod within the file to anything but "AricsExpansion"? It should be very specifically "mods/AricsExpansion/" then the files. As you posted, if you extract it so it has "mods/AricsExpansion/AricsExpansion" OR the folder name is changed (to just arics, like in your example) that it will crash on launch.
I agree with Aric's assessment, a wrong folder name makes the most sense as the cause, but I'd like to clarify some details.
Without the Debug Mod(https://itch.io/t/1137280/debugmod-v10d), most users won't get any debug console and some OS require launching the game through Command Prompt to get one.
Both the current mod system and AricsExpansion can handle non-direct folder locations for the mod so anything like ".../mods/.../AricsExpansion/" will work, but the folder containing "info.txt" must be named "AricsExpansion". The usual culprit is that GitHub names the Zip archive "AricsExpansion_main", which results in an incorrect folder name when extracted.
Please be sure to read the instructions for the Debug mod. It explicitly states that it is a manual patch and not installed using the mod system, so selecting it in the Mods menu will have no effect.
From what I can make out from the screenshot your "AricsExpansion" is spelled correctly, so you have some other issue.
Also, the mods are essentially always source code as the game is open source and the mod system works by editing the game's code to include the mod's code.
157 days ago(+1)
oh that explains it! i didn't realize that's how debug mode worked ^^' unselected it in the mod menu + put it in the right spot and everything's working fine now! my guess is the first go around was the aricsexpansion-main issue and then i was a dunderhead with debug mode, thank you so much! (misunderstood the ingame instructions of debug as it not being visible right away/in the mod menu, not that it wouldn't be in the mod folder until i looked at the txt file)