Hey, same here. Recently upgraded from R10 to R12 and noticed some strange freezes. They are literally everywhere - in chara creation and game itself. Seems it helped me a little to disable "cache zipmods metadata" in sideloader in plugin settings.
It has not completely get rid of these micro-freezes though. If someone has more information, besides the fact that the game has become graphically heavier, I will be glad to hear. It's clearly not a matter of system requirements, these micro-freezes appears without visible reason, for example, on a frozen character and the absence of actions in chara creation.