I am using Xorg as I was having some other issues with Wayland. but I am currently facing similar freezing issue.
@Yochanan I have 16 GB or ram and 18 GB of swap on an SSD ( I don’t know why I configured it this way!!) and my swappiness is set to 10 still my laptop freezes.
@rakin09 Take a look at this post if you have not done so already. “Hard Reset” can be damaging for your HDD.
for me, Alt + PrtScr worked as the SysRq key. Making the change in sysctl did not work for me. I had to edit the /etc/default/grub file.