Troubleshooting intermittent problems is always the most difficult because it's not a reproducible problem. You've had this going on since Fall of 2021. If it were my hardware doing this I would have ruled out each component one by one until I got to the cause. If you can live with the uncertainty of never knowing when a freeze up will happen that's up to you. At this point it's most likely hardware but you never know for sure until you pinpoint the cause. Random panics/freeze ups are a needle in the haystack type of problem. Most anything can cause them.
I know that I and most of the other mods here use the recommended WD NVMe drives as their primary boot drive for macOS and none have ever reported any KPs because of those drives. No slow boot times or even drive failures. That's why we recommend them to the community. It's not based on clinically controlled double blind studies, just user experience but that's good enough for my hackintosh. It's not a mission critical work machine and I have data backups if the drive were to fail. My 12+ year old 2.5" MLC Sata SSDs still work fine so it may be that I just have good luck, IDK.
