Playback freezes After Effects

Hey guys, 

this has been bothering me for quite a while and I haven't been able to find a solution on the web.

I'm using After Effects 22 on an M2 Macbook Pro (Ventura 13.0) with 8 GB RAM (yes, I know, it's far from optimal for Ae) . Whenever my project gets a bit 'heavier', I'm speaking of 7-10 layers (different kinds like shapes, .jpeg, .mp4, nulls, occasionally 3D) plus quite a bit of adjustment layers with cc, effects, lighting etc., and I press space/playback, it freezes indefinitely. 

I've tried rendering my projects in sections, then layering the files in a new comp to reduce workload, yet it would still happen.

Ae suddenly gives me the colorful spinning ball of death and never actually loads anything, no matter how long I wait, so I have to restart every time.

Once wanted to see if it's actually trying, went for dinner once and three smokes, 1 hour later it was still stuck in loading.

There are usually no other tabs opened either, although,

I usually keep my activity monitor open, and memory pressure never seems to be in a critical state.

The freezing happens whether I use Rosetta or not (I usually don't).

Clearing cache doesn't help either.

Hardware acceleration is off.

What seemed to work for a bit was manually dragging the CTI along the frames to pre-render them, and then press playback, yet just 10 minutes ago it still froze after doing that.

In addition, it doesn't just freeze while trying to preview those more 'complicated' projects or comps. It also occasionally does this in way(yyy) simpler projects (simple 15s 10-15ish layer .jpeg/.mp4 projects with minimal effects) and it's truly frustrating.

3rd party plugins I (occasionally) use are BCC and Sapphire.

I used to use After Effects CC 2017 on a Macbook Pro 2017 with 8GB RAM as well and, besides the with time worsening preview or final render durations, the performance was better there and I never experienced permafreezes like this. 

Since I've also talked to friends who experienced the same kind of freezes with Ae 22, it makes me think it is the versions problem. 

What do you guys think? Could it be an incompatibility with the plugins? Simply the version? Something else? I am losing my mind.

Thank you in advance!