"Microsoft will fix it in some random Windows Update and we'll never know the true cause"
One of the reasons is that Windows corrupts itself when the clipboard is empty, and you press right mouse button on the desktop.
When your explorer starts crashing, a simple workaround is to copy something, anything, some text from notepad, whatever.
Usually, you can't clear the clipboard from the gui, but you can from the code, this is what Firefox does in the private mode, or you can do it yourself with a dotnet command Clipboard.Clear()
Somewhere inside, windows allocates a memory block of size 0, then writes to that block, which it shouldn't do, as it corrupts the rest of the heap. This is what happens when you right click on the desktop, because the "paste" command is there, so it is trying to see if it should be enabled.
I guess, there are other reasons as well, but this one is where the bug lies with the ms.