Premiere freezes during autosave

Hey group, I have an incredibly frustrating issue that's been occurring on some of my projects.

I have autosaves set for every 5 minutes. If the autosave window pops up while I'm mid-task, like pressing the space bar to play back, clicking to make a cut, or doing any sort of navigation, Premiere will instantly lock up. I'm on a Mac, so I get the spinning wheel, the autosave never completes, and Premiere hangs indefinitely.

I'm regularly editing in a crunch with a need to move quickly, and I find that this happens incredibly often -- currently occurring once or twice an hour while working, and as the project size increases, this gets worse. The only solution is a force quit, praying that the previous autosave was recent (I find that the autosaves are often not truly saving every 5 minutes) or that I manually saved not long ago. Between this current project and other projects, I've lost hours of work.

Why not just turn off autosaves and save manually, you ask? I've also experienced such freezes when I'm saving manually. For some reason, I find that deselecting all assets on my timeline seems to lessen the likelihood of a crash during manual saves. But who knows, this could also be superstition.

Context:

• I'm working on a project that's referencing about 250 GB of content.
• My machine is an iMac Pro, running Mojave, with 32 GB 2666 MhZ DDR4 ram.
• I'm using proxies. And my playback is at 1/2 quality.
• I'm referencing about 20 simple AE comps through dynamic link.
• I have some audio effects applied to clean up interview audio, including compressors and Izotope tools. Problems began not long after beginning to apply, but I'm not sure if it's related.
• I have also done some color correction to the assets using Lumetri.
• The sequences I'm playing back are no longer than 4 minutes.
• I've reset permissions on all Adobe folders, and applied those changes to all enclosed items.
• I've tried migrating to a fresh project.

Perhaps unrelated?

• I've also had an issue with crashing during timeline playback, unprompted by anything. The timeline audio will continue to play, and if I have loop playback enabled, it will loop indefinitely, spinning wheel spinning away, and Premiere will not unlock without a forced quit.
• Projects that show these symptoms also tend to take a long time to open. Once I click a project to open it, the loading project status window will pause when the status bar is at about 75%, and take 5+ minutes to open from there for this particular project. On a previous project, where I was referencing a substantial amount of content (2+ TB), this stage would take 20 minutes.

In conclusion, I'm on my 20th version of this particular project. Each copy has been created because of a crash where I've lost work, and each one gets me closer to flipping my desk and tossing my machine out the window. If anyone has ideas, I'm all ears.