Why would Bitcoin Core freeze my computer when syncing? And is it supposed to take this long?
If your computer has some problem during the night, maybe the download never started, but it is normal that your bitcoin core is not in complete sync at the moment because the velocity of Sync doesn't depend on type connection (well it is part of the truth, if you have a slow connection, it is a problem).
In addition, I run a pruned sync on this days on my Linode node and I can share the data.
Before doing that I run the bitcoin node on a Linode server of 5$ and it runs without problem.
The space on the machine is 25Gb (Wow :-P) and it use only around 2/4 Gb I don't know well this data.
To prove that the connection is not important for the upper bound limit of velocity I can the Linode data where the VM works to sync the Bitcoin Network.

In addition, your bottleneck can be the disk, I know that in an HDD the synchronization is a little slower and it is also possible that you have a delay on the Bitcoin core answer. For instance when you run a command like getblockchaininfo. But this really depends on your Computer conf and HDD quality. In addition, I don't know if your disk encryption, can make things slower, I don't know this because I never use disk encryption (I like privacy but I like to pull my data if my Linux has some kernel panic :-) ).