This issue irritated me enough that it was one of the larger reasons I decided to build my own mod to replace this one (and yes, I've fixed this). I don't want to spam this board, but I did want to call out what was going on here. It might be worth a deeper investigation to submit a bug-report to Wube.
I believe it occurs due to an order-of-operations issue, because this mod listens for Upgrade, Deconstruct, and Construct events in order to "finish" them in-case they were ghosts. The Smart-Belts setting does something very unique whenever it "replaces" a Belt with an Underground Belt. It's specifically the Construct portion that completely crashes the game, and I couldn't gather enough information on the exact order-of-operations, but I do know for-sure that delaying the Construct at-least-one-tick completely avoids the bug. I've handled that within my own mod for greater compatibility, but I also want to attempt submitting a bug-report too.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint-sandboxes