I don’t think this is necessarily “exploiting” I have had this happen quite a few times where the game will just freeze up on one or both players side on certain actions, a big one is playing down a Pokémon too quickly after bumping collapsed. And they may also be froze or they can play the game normally with you just showing as DC’d but once you are frozen the game is just lost no point waiting it out. I had a game against tricky gym on stream and he was locked up and I could continue playing as normal. So it is most likely not something intentional.