The title is slightly misleading. ALL macs with a recent macOS (Catalina?) are freezing, since the security checks that happens when you launch a binary is down. Even if you don't update to Big Sur.
Indeed, I was bouncing a session in Logic and even that crawled, activity monitor showed a blank screen when it finally opened and iterm2 was unresponsive. I thought the machine was under load but the fans weren't even on.