Thanks for the feedback - It was a systemd issue. Something caused it to continue generating slices for espanso until the machine locked up - probably spawned with each terminal. It happened on out of date fedora install 36 (when 41 was out) with gnome on it.
Since then I’ve moved to a window manager for all my machines and would likely invoke it the same way - perhaps now it’s time to revisit!
All I need is for them to fix the public collection RSS feed bug where they embed “https,http” in the feed xml if you’re behind a reverse proxy - which breaks parsing