MEGATHREAD - Random Crashing/Freezing on PC

This also happens to me. In loading screens between missions or when using session marker often it can crash at random. It was especially bad in the missions around the church, where it would crash before/in/after every mission, sometimes multiple times. I've played for 30 hours and the game has never crashed while actively moving around, it's ONLY in the black loading screens with the board flipping. It has only happened once in the initial loading screen with the large 'skate.' logo.

When the game crashes, it slowly breaks everything on my pc. Windows elements like taskbar and desktop stop working first, then other applications like Steam, I can't open any new programs after this has started. If I'm quick enough to open task manager I can end the task and the game will quit instantly, ALT+F4 can make the game visually disappear, but it'll still break everything. Things that are in fullscreen/maximized break earlier. Video playback like Youtube will keep working a while if a video was playing before the crash occured, if I attempt to start video playback post crash, it'll buffer "forever" and the Youtube player will eventually tell me I need to restart the computer because it realizes something is wrong.

A few minutes post crash, I get a popup saying Microsoft Windows isn't responding. CTRL ALT DEL never stops working but most things just do nothing. I can click "change account" and it'll allow me to attempt to sign in to another but it'll just load forever. The only solution to this is to force shut down the pc just like OP.

System: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 | Ryzen 5 7500F | GTX 1050 Ti | 32 GB RAM | Game installed on mechanical HDD

Because my system meets or exceeds minimum system requirements I assume this isn't a hardware issue.