After Effects keeps getting stuck in render

I keep getting stuck on render when working on projects with 2 minutes+ duration, the elapsed time stops moving and it doesn't matter how much I wait, nothing changes. also, everytime it gets stuck on a different frame, so it's nothing frame or effect specific.

Shorter projects don't seem to have trouble rendering

The program doesn't crash and I can still click on the stop button, but it doesn't do anything and nothing happens, either it's to h264 or prores, still the same

This project literally only have 4 color gradient being used as an effect, nothing else but it happened on other projects as well

I've cleaned the cache and did everything except reinstall

I'm running version 24.6 and I can't update to 25 because some plugins I use still don't work with the new version (although i have very simple plugins)

Specs: Macbook Pro M3 Pro - 18gb RAM | 512GGB - macOS Sequoia 15.5

Rendering local to an external SSD (tried rendering to my mac's ssd but still the same problem)