M1 Mac Mini crashing and particularly with Safari

M1 Mac Mini 256GB / 8GB

Software up to date.

I did a clean install of Big Sur and all of my apps. Files are on cloud servers anyway so I didn't back up from Time Machine to make sure no junk gets copied over.

It has only become an issue in the past couple of weeks where the computer will completely freeze/crash while I'm using Safari, to the point where keyboard commands do not work to force quit and I cannot see the mouse. I usually end up having to force restart with the power button and upon restart it has not notified me of "restart due to problem, notify Apple etc" window.

Today it was able to restart on its own during a crash and upon reboot showed this window, in which I of course clicked Report.

On one instance, while Safari was open, after someone joined a Zoom call the computer froze but was able to unfreeze in a couple of minutes.

More often than not, it seems the issue stems from a particular webpage on Safari, which has not given me problems in the past. I even got rid of RAM-hogging extensions to try to remedy this but it clearly has not worked. The webpage is a video streaming site for my university where lectures are posted for us to view (TechSmith Knowmia). Similarly this happens with Google Drive shared files open but this is a known RAM-hogging page.

Safari constantly tells me "This webpage is using significant memory..." and will refresh the webpage spontaneously every 5-10 minutes on its own. Emptying cache, force quitting, etc etc has all been done to no permanent avail. Again, this website had no issues in the past when I was on my 2015 MBP.

I am unsure if the crashing/freezing is directly related to this webpage or not, but Safari has clearly been a bit buggy overall.

Funnily enough, EtreCheck also quit unexpectedly as I finished this post haha