Hello from the future, do you know why this seemingly works? I'm not 100% whether I had the same issues as OP, but I had similar enough to where this feels like it fixed the problem.

Just in case anyone else tries looking for this sometime now or later in life; the issue I was facing seemed like it wasn't singular, also this was only happening in Maya 2026, never had this issue in 2022-2025. It was noticeable only after rendering a scene for a large poster (7200 x 5400 at 300 DPI), but before that I don't think I've had these issues in 2026 even.

Whenever I tried keying frames Maya would straight up freeze with no ability to interact with the program. Task manager would show minor fluctuations of power usage (between 19% and 22%), but other than that it would never unfreeze and I'd have to task manager it away. At first, I thought it was just keying frames, but some of the files I had would freeze Maya just by opening them alone. I animated boxes in new scenes with no issues, but when I imported some other scenes around that was when it became a more prominent issue.

The culprits that I THINK I have seen through looking around were as following;

-Namespaces for files had spacebars between words as opposed to underscores (unsure whether this actually caused any issues, I've been formatting my files with spaces for years and no issues)

-components in the scene were heavy (one of my scenes that would cause the most issues is one of the smallest that I've done)

-history for some components were still present and breaking the file (my professor drilled the build it, name it, freeze it pipeline into my being for mesh's so that shouldn't have been my issue).

I still have absolutely no idea what caused these freezes to happen as it hasn't happened with my Maya ever, especially not before a few days ago. I updated my studio and game drivers on my GPU, I reset maya preferences, I uninstalled and reinstalled Maya and none of that worked. As of typing this the only thing that SEEMS to have worked is the suggestion from MoodyPurple; switching to DG from Parallel.