Lightroom Classic Freeze / Hang on macOS (after closing & reopening)

I’m experiencing a recurring problem with Lightroom Classic (v15.3) on macOS, running on a MacBook M5 Max with approximately 2.5 TB of free disk space. I haven’t encountered this issue prior to version 15.3, although I’m not certain if it is directly related.

Symptoms

• Lightroom opens the catalog, but:
  • spinning beachball appears frequently
  • images can sometimes be selected, but no zoom
  • previews remain blank or don’t load
• UI is partially responsive, but core functionality is blocked
• Replacing the catalog with a backup does not fix the issue
• Deleting Previews.lrdata also no effect
• Deleting .lock, .wal, .shm has no effect
• Initially, a full system restart resolved the issue. However, the problem has now progressed to a point where even restarting macOS no longer fixes it. Lightroom still opens in the same unusable state (beachball, no zoom, missing previews).

When the issue occured:

• No Lightroom process is visible anymore in Activity Monitor
• However, Lightroom still behaves as if something is blocking access

Crash / Hang report (key data)

• Event: hang
• Duration: ~70 seconds unresponsive
• Lightroom version: 15.3
• macOS: 26.4.1 (Tahoe)
• Architecture: Apple Silicon (arm64)
• Main thread state during hang: in application termination phase

Has anyone else experienced similar behavior on recent macOS versions?
Are there any known fixes or workarounds? At this point, I’m running out of things to try.