[loud neighbor]

I made another discovery that may be helpful to some. I had a new system-wide issue this morning. Booted up, couldn't type without a massive lag before whatever I typed showed up, Pro Tools and most other apps wouldn't even launch (like, click on the icon but nothing happens)... basically the OS was extremely sluggish and unresponsive - Safari / Mail wouldn't connect, etc. Three complete restarts, same problem. FUN TIMES.

After doing some research (on my phone of course), it seems that using the Thunderbolt ports on the GPU for anything other than a display MIGHT cause some issues. I had my display and a UAD TB box plugged (separately) into the GPU - W5700X in my case. It's convenient to use those ports since there are 4 of them but I moved the UAD TB cable to the last available non-GPU USB-C port and rebooted.

I'm now able to type and open programs again. YAY. Thanks Apple.

The good news is that I don't seem to have the original hard crash issue anymore but this new one might be even worse. I don't think re-allocating the PCI "Pools" had anything to do with it as you can't manually allocate the GPU. I didn't change anything else - it was working fine until I started it up this morning. Open to suggestions - I guess it was the GPU... I just don't know enough about this stuff to say with any certainty. All I'm offering is my own experience in the hopes that it helps some other frustrated soul. :)