In my opinion, freezing your credit is more of a nuclear option. It’s a bit of a pain to unfreeze your credit for valid credit applications or simple credit limit increase requests.

Also I think freezing also prevents soft credit pulls so automatic credit limit increases won’t be given or add an extra hassle of “unfreezing” to get the increase.

What I do is use those “free” credit monitoring services (ie, credit karma, credit sesame) and monitoring provided by some of my credit cards to get full coverage across all credit bureaus.

If any unrecognized application for credit comes through using my information, then I will immediately get notifications.

Otherwise, I just continue as normal. Request CLIs for my current cards and grow my available credit.