P: hangs When Importing

I've been subscribed for over 2 years now and have never been able to make use of Lightroom Classic. Every time I try to import more than a handful of folders worth of photos it just freezes up. I have tens of thousands of images from over the years but the most I've ever been able to import has been perhaps a thousand before it just freezes, and even then it takes up to an hour just to import a couple hundred. I'm using the add option so I don't know if that makes a difference. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling - more than once - before anyone asks.

This has happened on 2 different laptops by the way - I expected it with my old one as it didn't have enough RAM, but I kept lightroom in mind while buying my new laptop. Despite that it's still unusable for my needs...or anything to be perfectly honest. It also freezes every time I try to use to stitch panoramas. I'm doing them in photoshop now, but from the few times Lightroom hasn't crashed I know it's better for this than Photoshop. Please help.