I did try that with no luck.
I also managed to resolve the situation re-create the crash several times by sheer luck: if I moved the material instance out of the Content folder, when the shader starts up the material is disabled and so there’s no crash. I narrowed the crash down to MAYBE being an additional material function, but that function is already used throughout the shader, so the problem isn’t the function itself. That’s why I think it might simply be the amount of blueprint nodes being compiled. To partially confirm this I ended up deleting some other unnecessary nodes in my shader and it resumed working.