Thanks for the reply dop2000! "Wait for previous action" doesn't seem to make a difference there. But, I do get a runtime error which seems to go on forever after the button click.
I'm correctly passing it binary data. Especially since directly reading it wouldn't work in C3 anymore as this post suggests https://www.construct.net/en/forum/construct-3/how-do-i-8/import-image-sprite-146850
To quote Ashley:
Sprite's 'Load image' action takes a URL, not a file path. They're not the same thing. You probably should use the NW.js object to read the file in to a Binary Data object, then load the Binary Data object's URL instead.
And it does work when simply running a project in development, but doesn't when exported via NWjs.
Edit:
I debugged some more and when I use a different binarydata object for loading the image, it fails. Kind of confused at this point now.