To respond to myself: When I tried the same thing on my MacBook, instead of crashing I received the error message
Error: Bridgesampling failed. Perhaps you did not set 'save_pars = save_pars(all=TRUE)' when fitting your model?
Changing save_pars=save_pars("all") to save_pars=save_pars(all=TRUE) led to successful execution on the laptop; and when I made the same change on my Windows machine, it worked too. So, apparently the crash was just a result of incorrect use of the save_pars argument.