I have an older NVIDIA GPU and Blender crashed whenever I tried to render a single frame. If I unchecked DENOISING under VIEW LAYERS, the frame rendered properly. I read the manual which says if this happens, to reduce your tile size under RENDER -> PERFORMANCE -> TILES. Since I don't have a monster machine like Grant, I ended up with a tile size of only about 125x125 but it renders without crashing. As a newbie, it took me a long time to find the problem (but that's how we learn!), so I hope this helps someone.
Glad you figured out your issue, and thanks for sharing it so that others can learn from it too :)
It happens to me, too, except first my mouse stops working, then the screen goes black. After about five minutes, everything is back to normal, with the exception of Blender having crashed.
From some earlier courses, I thought it advised saving it as 250 single frame files and then compiling all those files into Blender. That way you're not trying to save the entire animation as a single file and takes up a lot less of the RAM to run the rendering. Not sure on how to compile all those files once rendered yet. I've yet to do the render and fear for the time it will take as I do not have a GPU.
I fear that if I render it before going to bed, I may have to play the part pf Rip Van Winkle. *sigh*