Mod-related function uses RemoveAllItems(). Follower has 90 steel arrows (and obviously other stuff). Long story short, the mod function kept freezing the game.
I thought that it had to do with another problem I'd been having, but even compensating for it, freeze.
Then I tried the RemoveAllItems console command. Intriguingly, it froze.
So I took varying combinations of the follower's gear until I figured out that leaving them with 90 arrows crashed the game.
And somehow, 100 arrows doesn't cause crashes.
Why?