How many of the people complaining use Overhead view I wonder?
Hey, so I noticed that after the Starfield fix for the same issue crashes still happen regularly in the story mission where you have to fight a large number of bugs in the basement of a warehouse. The workaround in that game is just to know how a viewbox works, so keep the bugs out of sight whilst you kill them more slowly and you'll probably get through without crashing.
Because of that I changed my camera angle in NHL to classic rather than overhead and that alone reduced the crashes to... at least quarter (would need more testing to be more accurate). At this point I feel like my hypothesis is strong that when you have a model being cloned (as in the crowd) but which isn't doing the animation it does at the same time as the other models, then the shader is considering the bones (not the model as a whole, but the skeleton) as separate. Also though I've noticed that if you see any chugging at all, just pause for a moment, and let it catch up (I managed better than a quarter, but not when I raced through the intermissions like I used to). It's only based on the small amount of work I did on the 360, but it definitely seems like the problem is that the garbage collector is not good at burying skeletons.
That being said, based on the devs from both here and Bethesda it also seems that there's an additional issue with the cloud computing (as opposed to just game saves) not picking up the slack that Microsoft thought it could. Maybe the computers doing the computing are geographically closer to yours than ours the bug doesn't show up (that's based on how originally turning off autosaves helped for me in Starfield, but similarly to switching to classic view, not enough to solve the problem entirely until I could lower the number of models (or my guess, different animations being run on any given clones of a given model, at a different time, which way back for the 360 mattered because of the bone count, and if cloud computing is helping with the shader then they might be copying and pasting those models rather than actually cloning them, but that's just my guess)