Hi there,
Your issue might be already solved by now, but if not,.. or may be for others... here what i found out.
I had the same issue when creating a PDF from an Autocad drawing. My Acrobat Reader Pro was lagging so much that i couldn't even use Acrobat Reader. Kind of a bummer if you pay for a premium software. The fact is that opening the drawing into my Firefox browser was even way faster than in Acrobat Reader.
I found out it was when i was exporting my drawing to PDF, using the option of exporting Layers into the PDF.
Thanks God i came accross a web page (no idea anymore which one), where i found my solution to that issue.
I encourage you or anybody else to try that and see if it helps.
I believe that Visual Basic ++ was commonly installed when using a windows platform. I believe also it's not the case anymore for a few years now.
i am on windows 10 Pro and what i did was to install "Visual Basic ++" (i used the version 2015-2019)
i restarted my computer, and now my Acrobat Reader could open my large PDF files with layers without crashing.
Hope this can help anyone here having such an issue.
Kind regards.
Arnaud