Following up on myself, here are 2 screenshots taken from the Clock window inside my frozen VM, taken 10 minutes apart:
As you can see, the clock has jumped. But it is not regularly updating, it only happens in big jumps. And I still cannot interact with the VM.
When the VM hangs, I can see vmware-vmx.exe suddenly taking 25% CPU, on an 8-core/16-thread system:
