I’ve played thousands of hours of gmod and I can safely say I’m not surprised you’re having issues, it really is a dumpster fire.
Regarding your freezing issue, If you haven’t already, first verify game files especially if you were tinkering with them to fix the previous issue.
Failing that, go to the properties of gmod in steam and participate in the chromium_x64 branch, let it download and then try run that and you will probs have less issues. I find that sometimes it will freeze during the blue screen and actually completely locks my system up, but it’s nowhere near as often when I run the x64 Chromium branch (which everyone really should use unless they have a 32bit system).
One more thing to consider is if you’re subscribed to a huge amount of workshop addons it could be freezing while trying to mount them all. No harm in doing an unsubscribe purge and deleting the files from your gmod dir.