I also experienced this, and immediately after a reinstall, Firefox decided that it didn’t like to be reinstalled and bricked my OS. I had to completely reinstall it because the boot section was nowhere to be found, and barely any data was salvageable.
So, even if Chrome is bad, I prefer to use Ungoogled Chromium or other chromium forks that don’t nuke my computer than using a browser that has consistently given me extreme problems.
I don’t think it’s a RAM issue, unless Firefox eats 16GB of RAM. I mainly use Pop!_OS, a *nix distro, so maybe I messed up some package install that conflicts with Firefox in some way, but I haven’t figured out which one.