Ask HN: Do you also have to restart intellij multiple times a day?

Nope, I've actually had it opened for multiple days and just walked away and come back and it has been fine. I've had a few occasions where I restart it cause of something, but not like you are describing. I have two machines I run the intellj IDE's on, m1macpro and a intel based macpro, neither has any issues.

I am also not doing Java, primarily either node.js or C/C++, or I am using DataGrip.

Maybe you're running out of memory? https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/increasing-memory-heap.h...

Might be it, I thought I changed it but apparently not ...

Review your active 3rd party extensions. That's the most likely place for a misbehaving component in an IDE.

I only ever restart it for updates every month or so