What is the cause and how to fix this?
This is a bug in the widevine.helper add-on which has been fixed upstream, but might not be publised in an add-on update? - You'd need to check their release notes. I've seen the same a week ago when prompted to update. It won't ever complete, but unpacking has already been done so either restart Kodi or reboot the box over SSH and all should be fine.