Well, on another symptom: I had not seen any of this on either 16 or 17 until yesterday. I was doing some browser investigation using Firefox running on a throw-away Debian 11.5 VM. I was running on Debian 11.5 host with 16. As I was looking at results with Brave versus Firefox, the system would slow to a freeze. I put the system monitor and the Mate system monitor on the desktop and watched. As I connected FF to streaming services, like youtube, it consumed more and more memory until it froze. In several cases, I had to reset the VM to recover. It did not affect the host or other VM's. Duckduckgo'ing the problem found others with FF hogging memory. Probably not the same as you folks but the fix is simple. I guess another fix would be throwing a bunch of RAM at it, I only gave it 4GB

Have you tried watching system monitors, including good old simple top?

Lou