Hey MasterLink, I feel you. I have the very same issues with Brave and YouTube after I bought a whole set of new computer parts.
I use a PWA for YouTube which is windowed, not maximized. The whole rendering of all Brave windows will freeze at random times, which I can unfreeze by just dragging the YouTube window a bit.
I also noticed some audio crackling every now and then, caused by high latency. I use the audio provided by the video card via HDMI.
My old PC was running Win 10 on an Intel CPU and a GTX 1080 Ti and I never experienced issues like this.
My new PC runs Win 11 on an AMD CPU with a RTX 5080 and the freezes occur quite often - at least until yesterday.
Yesterday I disabled HAGS (Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling (a Windows feature, not Braves hardware acceleration)) and Brave has not frozen once so far. Also the audio crackling is gone.
When you look up infos about HAGS and video decoding you’ll probably find the following link: https://obsproject.com/kb/hags, which recommends disabling it since it can cause encoding issues with OBS - I suspect that this can also lead to problems with video decoding.
So you might want to try out disabling HAGS, if it’s enabled.
And don’t forget to restart your PC afterwards.