High end laptops, desktops and servers, both physical and VM (I also get the same experience with Windows Server 2016).
The only thing I can think of is that I disable all telemetry / cortana / web search / one drive features (through registry settings, not DNS). It is possible that Microsoft doesn't test properly their OS with all the features mentioned in the article switched off and that the Start menu blocks on something. But I consistently observe this on multiple machines.
Cortana is explorer to some extent, they are breakingly integrated. If you are killing cortana + all cortana services/backend via regedit or another method it will certainly crash continuously.
In your setup you would need to be using a start menu replacement.
The only thing I can think of is that I disable all telemetry / cortana / web search / one drive features (through registry settings, not DNS). It is possible that Microsoft doesn't test properly their OS with all the features mentioned in the article switched off and that the Start menu blocks on something. But I consistently observe this on multiple machines.