Major freezing issue - How can I resolve it?

After reviewing your EtreCheck report, I do not think your MacBook Pro has a hardware problem.

The SSD reports 100 percent health, its read and write speeds are excellent, and there are no signs of memory failures, storage errors, or kernel panics. Your M4 Pro hardware appears to be in good condition.

The strongest clue is that Spotlight-related processes are consuming an unusually large amount of CPU time.

The report shows corespotlightd, spotlightknowledged.updater, mdwrite, and knowledgeconstructiond repeatedly appearing in the diagnostics over several days.

That is not normal. It suggests that Spotlight is attempting to index your files but is repeatedly getting stuck instead of completing its work. When that happens, it can easily produce the freezing and spinning beachball cursor that you are experiencing.

I also noticed that fileproviderd is using a significant amount of CPU.

This is interesting because your Mac is using both Dropbox and Google Drive, each of which integrates deeply with Finder through Apple's File Provider framework. In some cases, Spotlight and cloud storage providers can end up repeatedly scanning and updating the same files, creating a cycle of continuous indexing. It is one of the more common causes of persistent Spotlight activity on recent versions of macOS.

Although EtreCheck reports that your SSD is "too slow," the actual performance numbers tell a different story.

Your SSD is reading at approximately 5.1 GB per second and writing at approximately 4.0 GB per second. Those are excellent results for an internal Apple SSD. The warning is much more likely reflecting the fact that the drive is busy handling constant indexing activity rather than indicating a hardware fault.

Your memory usage also does not appear to be the root cause.

While there is about 2.6 GB of swap in use, that is perfectly reasonable for a Mac with 24 GB of RAM. The report also shows nearly 13 GB of available memory once cached memory is taken into account, so the system is not under severe memory pressure.

The high kernel_task usage is probably a symptom rather than the cause of the problem. When Spotlight and file indexing generate heavy disk activity, the kernel naturally becomes busier managing that workload.

One thing that stands out is that your Mac has been running for about four days, while the diagnostics show Spotlight-related high CPU events occurring throughout that period. That strongly suggests the indexing process is never actually finishing.

Based on everything in the report, I think the most likely explanation is that Spotlight is stuck in a continuous indexing cycle, possibly involving Dropbox or Google Drive.

A corrupted Spotlight index is another possibility, although it is somewhat less likely. I do not see evidence pointing toward a failing SSD, insufficient RAM, or a hardware defect in your Mac.

Contributing factors 

1 - Commercial VPNs 

They may not be what one believes they are doing for the computer and what they actually are doing behind the scenes and unbeknownst to the user ( you ) 

They may also reduce your Internet Speeds by upwards of 30% 

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

VPN: What you need to know - Apple Community

2 - Short and unpopular suggestion for some

 https://chromeisbad.com

May consider an alternative https://brave.com which is essentially Google Chrome without the Google baggage

Stop Chrome Browser From Downloading a Hidden 4GB AI File

Refer to the Posting by Respected Contributor @ John Galt 

Application memory error on my MacBook Pro - Apple Community

Refer to the Posting by Respected Contributor @ Kurt Lang

etrecheck... Mac running slow - Apple Community

1 - Google Chrome is overly aggressive in Resource and Memory usages.

2 - Google Chrome harvests all your personal data unbeknownst to you and sells your personal data,  which intern allows the Third Parties to Target you for their purposes 

Iit is really hard to add anything to the excellent analysis provided above by Owl-53. I agree wholeheartedly.

But you are not showing any sign of a local, disk-based file backup scheme.

"On the cloud" is great for sharing photos, but is not a viable backup solution for everything you have. The stuff is not under your control, and is subject to sloppy handling, arbitrary changes in policy, theft, accidental deletion, data loss [are they making frequent backups using best practices?], and discontinuation or throttling of the service. It can easily take three days to restore it at ordinary Internet speeds.

If you do not have a recent local, disk-based backup, your computer is like a ticking Time bomb. You are only one disk failure, one mainboard failure, one crazy software, or one "oops" away from losing EVERYTHING! Drives do not last forever. It is not a question of IF it will fail, only WHEN it will fail. In addition, you never know when crazy software or Pilot Error throws away far more than you intended.

If you are using another direct-to-disk backup method that you prefer, and you currently have a recent disk-based backup, that is great. If not, you should consider using Built-in Time Machine. Take steps to acquire an external drive as soon as possible. If you buy one, a drive 2 to 3 times or larger than your the amount of data to be backed up is preferable for long term trouble-free operation. Do not pay extra for a drive that is fast.  (You can get by for a while with a "found" smaller drive if necessary, but it will eventually become annoying).

Attach your external drive and use

Settings > General > Time machine ...

... to turn on Time Machine and specify what drive to store your Backups on.  It may ask to initialize the new drive, and that is as expected. APFS format is default format if running MacOS 11 Big Sur or later.

Time machine works quietly and automatically in the background, without interrupting your regular work, and only saves the incremental changes (after the first full backup). Time machine backs up your machine — including every connected drive that is in a Mac compatible format. it can not back up Windows format drives.

Time Machine's "claim to fame" is that it is the backup that gets done. It does not ruin performance of the rest of the computer while doing its backup operations. You do not have to set aside a "Special Time" when you only do backups. When you need it, your Time machine Backup is much more likely to be there and be current.

How to use Time Machine to Backup or Restore your Mac:

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

If we may add to the great advise by our colleague @ Grant Bennet-Alder

Two things:

1 - If you have used or are using Time Machine Backup Utility  you maybe able to Restore the Deleted Files 

For future purposes

To truly protect your non replaceable Data

Have a 3-2-1 Rescue Plan in place and always current

3 Backups using 2 methods and 1 off site incase of natural disaster or un-natural disaster.

Each of the above should be done to a Dedicated Single Purposed External Drive 

Below link is intended to augment what TM Backup does 

https://bombich.com

How to schedule a backup

2 - Something to keep an " eye " on before it may become an issue

The Apple SSD AP1024Z has a capacity of 1.00 TB (994.66 GB usable after formatting). 

TRIM is enabled, which helps maintain performance and longevity by allowing macOS to efficiently manage deleted blocks. 

There are  202.37 GB of completely unused space and 385.20 GB of available space for applications. 

This includes the free space and purgeable space like local snapshots, caches, or files that macOS can automatically remove if needed. 

From another contributor @etresoft regarding Free Space and Available Space 

Free vs available disk space huge differe… - Apple Community

Quote >>  “ The "available" storage is the amount of used storage that the operating system could automatically delete if it felt that it was really necessary. The "free" storage is the amount that you can actually use for something.

There are system processes that run in the background and automatically delete some of the "available" storage and convert it to "free". If you completely run out of storage, then those system processes will try a little harder. When you "delete" files you are just hinting to the operating system that you don't need those files anymore. The operating system will eventually remove them, but on its own schedule.

Certain tools will allow you to force the issue and manually clean up some of this storage and manually delete local snapshots. But that is only temporary. "  << End Quote 

Purgeable Space is controlled by the Operating System and not the user 

Get detailed information about a disk in Disk Utility on Mac

Thx + 1