While the hitching is happening I can’t, as neither the mouse or keyboard respond to inputs. I did try preloading the command in terminal, forcing a freeze and alt-tabbing back to terminal and hitting enter to see if it would work, but only the alt-tab was registered when the freeze stopped. I restarted plasmashell anyways, but today was one of the times it would only hitch once and everything works again, so I can’t force a freeze again until later. That said, the power management section of system settings is still not loading so it seems the PC is still in it’s mood at the moment even though the hitching isn’t happening. Terminating the system settings app does actually generate a stack trace as the app crashes proper, but I’m still unclear how related the two issues are for now.
I did consider heading to the bug tracker to file a report there, but the issues is still vague and I don’t know if my available info is enough to work with yet so I held off.