Given that it was previously installed, it was probably not Etcher or the USB stick that made the difference.
Of the two remaining choices, again it installed previously - and you had consistent behavior from a few distros. So, it's unlikely to be the checksum.
That leaves the modifier, when you added a modifier to the boot menu - the i915.enable_psr=0 bit.
So, that's the most likely culprit. That's not *definite*, but it's the *most likely*.
You can test this of course. You could simply remove it and see if the freezing resumed. Or, you can just keep on computing happily with your newly installed Linux. I'd suggest making a note of what you did so that you can do so in the future, should you have to reinstall your operating system for one reason or another.