I think I'm missing something here. That page exists now, so I tested this by navigated to another page that doesn't exist. If I click the edit pencil, then I can edit the page as normal, so I don't know how to reproduce this problem.

That said, you are right that that link doesn't work if your skin is MinervaNeue. I suspect that this is a problem with the skin, as that link works fine for me using Timeless, MonoBook, and Vector. Where is this link is exposed to users of the MinervaNeue skin?

^ hopefully that helps. Otherwise visit Special:Preferences and opt into the skin. You encounter this issue any time you follow a red link.
It seems some problematic JS is being loaded by VisualEditor without any fail safe.
Looks like there is something wrong in the logic here for isSupportedEditPage:
https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-VisualEditor/blob/740b61598f1eb176b5dceb0e5c5a56993c4de7ba/VisualEditor.hooks.php#L243
Or in the JS provided by VisualEditor that actually loads the editor.

I'll go back to my first guess. It is expected that once isSupportedEditPage returns true, that the page will have all the elements for initialising the editor in place. In this case the page doesn't have the #ca-edit link.

This is the offending line:

public function getPageActions() {
    return $this->isFallbackEditor() ? [] : $this->data['page_actions'];
}

This is intentional. Why would a editor have/need an edit icon? We only have a save button on that page.

It is assumed that you need to some 'edit' link to trigger and re-trigger the editor. Pinging @matmarex who wrote this code.

Change 462686 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; owner: Bartosz Dziewoński):
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Remove #ca-edit from required skin elements

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/462686

Change 462686 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/VisualEditor@master] Remove #ca-edit from required skin elements on edit pages

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/462686