This is an unrelated issue, see this thread. Basically, the 2.5.4 version of the ZWave binding is currently broken because of a whitespace formatting error in some of its XML files.
The workaround is to not install automatically the ZWave binding (so remove it from addons.cfg or however you have installed) and to manually install the current 2.5.5 ZWave snapshot of the binding into the /usr/local/libexec/openhab2/addons directory. This will get you the current version:
fetch https://openhab.jfrog.io/openhab/libs-snapshot-local/org/openhab/addons/bundles/org.openhab.binding.zwave/2.5.5-SNAPSHOT/org.openhab.binding.zwave-2.5.5-20200504.110626-5.jar
You will also need to use Karaf to manually install
feature:install openhab-transport-serial
at which point the ZWave binding should silently start working. You can see if it is installed in Karaf using list -s | grep zwave.