Catalina bricked my MacBook Pro

You're not the only one to have encountered this problem. It seems that everyone is having a problem with one of the disks labeled APFS VOLUME VM giving the error you're receiving. The following is not an ideal solution if you're needing to recover data or anything. If you don't care about data recovery, just blow it all away and start over again.

• Start the MacBook in recovery mode by holding Command+R at reboot.
• Once booted into recovery mode, go to the terminal (top menu bar, under utilities) and list your drives with the command diskutil apfs list and you should see an output like below.

• Look for your volume APFS Volume VM and noted the identifier for that APFS Volume.
• Delete the VM volume by using the command diskutil apfs eraseVolume IDENTIFIER. So for this example output the command would be diskutil apfs eraseVolume disk1s4
• Once deleted it should create a new volume again, verify this by running diskutil apfs list
• Reboot and try the install again