What if the erase function stops responding in Disk Utility?

It may indicate a failing drive. You can try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected.

It helps if you provide the exact model of Mac since there are so many different models, some with their own unique issues plus it helps us to better tailor a response to your situation. For example with some Macs I can provide another option for checking the health of a drive since the diagnostics don't detect many drive failures. You can get the exact model information by clicking the Apple menu and selecting "About This Mac" or by entering the system serial number here if the Mac is unable to boot into macOS:

Check Your Service and Support Coverage - Apple Support

Were you able to run the Apple Diagnostics and if so, what were the results?

There are two ways of checking the health of the internal drives. One requires a USB3 SSD or hard drive where you would install macOS onto the USB drive from Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R) making sure to properly erase the USB drive and choose it as the destination for the installer. With a full macOS booting USB drive you can boot to it and run DriveDx to check the health of the internal drive(s). Post the complete text report here for each internal drive using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

If you don't have a USB SSD or hard drive to use, then another option is to create a bootable Linux USB stick to check the health of the internal drive(s). This option just requires a USB stick and access to another computer (Mac/Windows/Linux) to download the Linux image and create the bootable USB stick. If you are interested in this option, then let me know.

Follow the instructions here:

Erase and reinstall macOS - Apple Support