Hi there,
Are you able to post a screen recording of everything leading up to the freeze? That should help with figuring out what's happening.
I booted up the game and tried stuff like just going down the pipe, going back and forth between the junction and the pipe, taking damage while going down the junction, etc, and none of those caused the freeze. Can you clarify what you meant by "fairly consistent"? Does the freeze happen when you try to go down the pipe or are you trying to go back up, or something else?
I've also received a similar report over on Discord, and I'm waiting for a recording of that. Having two different recordings would be ideal since then I can compare the similarities/differences, which would hasten the bug finding process.