I thought "hard freeze" in Debian meant "no NEW packages; fix existing bugs".  So while you may not get an updated LXQT from say....2.0 to 2.2, you should absolutely get an updated from 2.0 to 2.0.1 (but still referred to as 2.0).  Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I understood it to be.   So getting a big update during "hard freeze" indicates to me that Trixie-Testing is MUCH closer to release as Trixie-Stable.

There will still be a lot of updates until Trixie is released as Stable (soon™  ). I had over 400 yesterday.

True enough. I have both GNOME and LXQt desktops installed.

You got a lot of updates because you got a lot of stuff installed.  

Although Debian Trixie is currently in Hard Freeze status, I received an update of over 1300 packages yesterday. Why this happened I don't know. However everything went OK and I was able to reboot and carry on as normal.