Even with 64GB of RAM, crashing due to out of ram still happens after a few dozen complex scenes. I found I can make a huge page file (Another 64GB or so) on a ultra fast M2 drive and it will mostly solve it (unless I load like 100 complex scenes without restarting), however it literally tears apart that M2 drive with writes. Not ideal solution but better than a random crash while your working on something.
I hope the wait for 2.0 will be worth it.
Yeah the GC is a real Pain and memory leaks can happen virtually everywhere also the Streaming is really outdated even in Unitys own Engine terms.
But if you take the fact that everything was buildup with a Unity state far from where we are now it's impressive.
In it's overall Simulation complexity their is nothing even yet comparable on the Unreal side, really most Unreal approaches do not have this overall complexity in a functioning way only very few even a bit comparable.
And if you compare how much limits we face here on the Engine side compared to what Unreal could do we are still not beaten as a whole community by anyone
We have a pretty decent functioning MetaHumans in Realtime and this with heavy blendshape limits

with extreme complex Simulation that runs on 1 CPU/GPU but far from Multicore efficient.
VAM 2.0 will higher the whole Simulation complexity even further
VAM 1.0 pretty much brought Unity at that time to it's full limits and above
You can try several things to keep 1.x more stable one of it is try to unload everything from the current running scene by loading a blank one first before loading another.
The problems are often also inefficiency of the plugins which not get correctly destroyed and leak out.
Always try to keep the Plugin usage to a minimum.
And stability test once in a while with a Stability Benchmark not a Performance Benchmark
Be sure to have always enough space free for the VAM cache
Try to avoid using the VAM Hub while running a scene
Use a External VAR Manager to pre prepare VAM for what you need before execution allways try to reduce .var overhead as much as possible.