Lived this many times. the worst part about these freezes is what happens right before the freeze - everyone will rush to push their changes prior to cutoff, which is exactly when you get the sloppiest commits. and then after the freeze lifts you get a flood of piled up changes all at once. Smaller, continuous deploys with a good rollback are way less risky than big batched releases after a freeze.

I cannot fathom why anyone would use a code freeze. Just create a branch at the commit you want to "freeze" and let dev teams keep working with their regular branches.