“Aforementioned”, what an euphonic word, gotta use that more often, haha.
I actually only import sketchup models downloaded from 3dwarehouse. There is a lot of free usable stuff there. I did test to import them as Collada directly in 2.8, but the Sketchup Importer addon does a better job most of the time in my experience.
As for the crashes, after the 2.8 official release they are almost inexistent for me. In object mode I can work with ease even on big files (making heavy use of the Quick Instance Addon). Edit mode is another story, but that tends to improve.