macOS Catalina: VirtualBox crashes on Linux VM boot

Whether you’re setting up a fresh Linux VM in VirtualBox on macOS Catalina (10.15.6), or migrating a VM over from an older macOS version, you can be in for a nasty surprise — once the VM boots, VirtualBox crashes with a mere stack trace.
Personally I tested this with openSUSE, but since there’s similar reports from Ubuntu, this seems a fairly common problem.

The error and the stack trace will look something along these lines:

VirtualBox VM quit unexpectedly

Crashed Thread:     34  Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.default-qos
Exception Type:     EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Termination Reason: Namespace TCC, Code 0x0

The solution is simple, yet all the more annoying: disable audio in the VM settings.

At a guess, one of the many new security limitations in Catalina is denying VirtualBox permissions and the latter does’t know what to do besides throwing a fit.