In my case the error was pointing to the AndroidManifest.xml file. I had this line:
<meta-data
android:name="com.google.android.actions"
android:resource="@xml/popup_info.xml" />
Which, I'm not sure why Android Studio put that there. I didn't change my manifest file, and this never happened until I upgraded to version 3.5.3 - so AS must have done it for me. Anyway, the line should have looked like this:
<meta-data
android:name="com.google.android.actions"
android:resource="@layout/popup" />
Once I changed that, it was all good.