Blogdown::serve_site is failing

Question

I'm relatively new to blogdown and am trying to preview my site. I've done this before, but it stopped working recently. Here's what I'm seeing:

> install.packages("blogdown")
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/Rtools/
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/moham/AppData/Local/R/win-library/4.4’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.4/blogdown_1.20.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 331512 bytes (323 KB)
downloaded 323 KB

package ‘blogdown’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
    C:\Users\moham\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpGuG1BM\downloaded_packages
> library(blogdown)
Warning message:
package ‘blogdown’ was built under R version 4.4.2 
> 
> blogdown::check_site()
Error in merge_list(defaults, values) : 
  could not find function "merge_list"

I don't know how to fix this "merge_list" function issue. Any ideas?

I was told to remove and reinstall the package, and even restart my R Window. Neither of these things helped. I continued getting the error message about the "merge_list" function.