Tried every node I can think of and every piece of VEX I could find to get rid of these things, but to no avail.

Any geo exported from Houdini will have polyblinddata nodes stuck to them when brought into Maya, unless deleted maya will freeze when trying to export this geo again.

If anyone is having this same problem, the solution is to make sure both groups and attributes are all deleted. I had used a clean node and deleted all extra groups, however I didn't delete all attributes just before export. This solved the issue and gave me much cleaner geometry.

There's a couple threads going around that suggest adding extra attributes to achieve consistent normals between houdini and maya, this was actually one of the things that caused my issues:

https://ddankhazi.com/2020/08/26/hard-edge-data-from-houdini-to-maya/ [ddankhazi.com]

Not sure if there's any other factors in my install or machine that are causing this. The above strategy may work for you, but if you're having the same issue definitely don't do that ^^