Just in case this helps someone, the issue was I had selected all my tables in my sde database. Initially, I too had a couple of views that were selected, so I removed these. I still encountered the mysterious error. My selection also included the SDE Compress Log table, which after removing the table from the selection I was able to create a replica. Apparently this table can't be part of a replica.
TLDR: don't try to create a replica with the table SDE_compresss_log