within about 5-10 seconds of waking to the desktop, the entire system freezes
I know there's not a big time window to check, but does the computer appear to work ok during the 5-10 seconds ?
After the 10 seconds, what's the state of the freeze ?
Is it total or do things like the mouse pointer or Caps Lock key still respond ?
Does the clock in the corner show the right time or is it stuck at a interesting time (e.g. sleep, wake or freeze)?
Does pressing Ctrl Alt F2 together do anything ?
Next time you do a sleep/wake/reboot cycle, make a careful note of the sleep time and the freeze time.
After the reboot open a terminal and run a command like this
journalctl --since "2023-02-21 11:30" --until "2023-02-21 11:40"
Replacing the date and times with your sleep and freeze values - add a bit of margin but don't include the reboot.
This will page through the system logs. There will be a lot of stuff but you may pick up something.