I continued to do some trouble-shooting on my own.
I noticed that it wasn't the USB connection causing the crash, but actually just waking from sleep. I didn't know why. I figured it always worked on my PBs, so it might have to do with Intel or Rosetta. I checked and saw that the only Rosetta app that was always running was
MKConsole. I then saw that not running MKConsole would prevent the crashes from happening upon waking the MBP. To be sure it was MKConsole and not Rosetta emulation per se, I tried it with another PPC app under Rosetta emulation: Word 2004. No crashes.
So I guess the crashes were really being caused by MKConsole itself. There's no UB port of the app. I've stopped running it and informed the developer.