Thank you both, first of all!
Worth to mention that I am using PD for the first time on a MacBook that I fresh reseted a month ago. No intentional manipulation of audio setting, ports and such has been done since. This Mac is fairly fresh and virgin. And it is working like a charm except for PD. All this considered, I am afraid that resetting now the SMC has few chances to solve the issue.
In our class there are 9 people, everyone with a different Mac. Only 2 of the 9 Macs had the latest OS (Ventura) and exactly these two Macs have similar problems (PD's GUI freezing or not responding as expected). This led me think that the problem may be somehow connected to the OS update. But this can also be just an absolute coincidence.
(...and no, unfortunately none of them will agree on updating their Mac's OS in order to help out finding what's the problem here, I can tell you already. Teacher even suggested them to not update the OS).
I attach the patch. As you can see this is just the first 5 minutes of a very first class on using PD. No settings where modified from the default and no complex patch content.
esercizio_001.pd
Indeed, as everyone I do have programs for communication (not Skype, but Zoom for example) although in that moment these were not being used at least not in the GUI. Consider though that I tried again several reboots and Zoom is not in my automatic startup launched apps.