Hi @SteveXD, I recently went through process of setting up Blogdown with GitHub integrating directly with RStudio. I ran into a VERY similar issue, with RStudio essentially crashing and having to terminate after a few minutes. This was relatively reproducible when I went to stage/commit the files.
My suggestion and how I got everything to work was switching away from full integration of Git and RStudio. I switched over to SourceTree at the recommendation of several R Users. Sourcetree is also Jenny Bryan's favorite as mentioned in Happy Git with R.
Sourcetree really improved my Blogdown workflow and I enjoy the UI a lot!