The freeze sometimes does capture in between states. What I've seen the agent does in those cases is that it recognizes it's in between states and calls browser_wait(). Where the agent goes off the rails isn't a snapshot in the middle of a state transition, (it's smart enough to know to retry in that case), it's when the DOM changes after the agent believes the page has settled.

For async, lots of people smarter than me working on the smarter agent problem. Though there's a latency floor with inference due to prompt processing, and output generation. Without tools like ABP, the LLM is always aiming at a moving target.