My first installation of GrapheneOS was with a Macbook Air at a coffe cafe with public wifi.
I highly recommend all the videos from 'Side of Burritos' on youtube specifically the installation videos. He made live recordings of the entire installation process for several different Pixel devices. I watched them all; it was worthwhile since each one here and there has some additional tidbit of information not repeated in the others.
If you're brand new to GrapheneOS, he has a number of videos explaining certain features.
The devs recommend using the usb cable provided by Google with the phone. But as a "here's what worked for me", I used an Apple cable and power adapter -- I think Apple has horrible ethics but great hardware.
As far as what can render the phone unresponsive, from first hand experience it's losing track of the devs' recommendation to have 32GB of free storage space. During a subsequent installation using a Pixel w/ GrapheneOS to install it onto another Pixel, my phone was 84% full. Another time, unrelated to installing GrapheneOS, at 84% full my phone locked up -- it finally was responsive again because I have auto-reboot enabled.
Another factor that could contribute to a problematic installation is deviating from the devs' web browser recommendation (e.g. Ungoogled Chromium); I was persuaded against that idea after coming across a post from a dev identifying that was the cause of a particular case of installation woes.
I'm completely unwilling to use Google Chrome so I installed and used Brave browser (one of the recommended browsers) on the Macbook; as an aside, like Firefox, Brave browser has some default settings that are worth changing; see the link below.
'Side of Burritos'
https://piped.smnz.de/channel/UCij1VEjDb88RCbqsvZ1gqaw
web browser reommendation
https://grapheneos.org/install/web
settings to change in Brave browser (scroll half-way down this link to the heading 'Settings')
https://thenewoil.org/en/guides/most-important/browser/