Applications keep "Not Responding"

Since getting one of the new 2020 MBPs with Catalina, on a near daily basis various applications will just permanently stop responding. I can't comment as to if this is a Catalina issue or a 2020 MBP issue as I was previously on a 2017 MBP with Mojave.

At this point I have to do a hard reset pretty much every few days as the entire machine locks up. Nothing of any note in /var/log/system.log, when it happens other than the application being tagged as 'Not Responding' there's nothing of note going on as per Activity Monitor (no CPU usage, no memory footprint). Always happens when new applications start: application starts, spinning pinwheel and things progressively lock up.

The issue seems pretty indiscriminate as to what those apps are though - for example, earlier today the Apple Error Reporting app crashed with the same issue, and yesterday 'About This Mac' triggered the same issue. It really feels like there is some check that happens when Apps start (in general) and this then hangs indefinitely after a while.

The most recent failure may have had something to do with the GPU, as on starting the application via iTerm after freezing for ~5 min it displayed "Core Image is now using the software OpenGL renderer. This will be slow." which I'd not seen before. The same application (emacs) reopened later did not have the same message.

I'm at a loss as to what to do. This machine has now crashed more than every computer I have owned combined. I've been using high end Macbooks for about 8 years, and each upgrade has been more expensive and a worse experience. I have recently reverted back to using my 2014 MBA and it is honestly a faster and more responsive machine than the 2020 MBP.

Any thoughts on how to diagnose and/or address what's going on appreciated.