Deus Ex:GOTY crashes on the "BatteryPark" level

My problem is a rather simple one:
When running Deus Ex: GOTY on Steam, the game crashes when in the Battery Park level, near the vent section, leaving a critical error message:

I'm running the game on Linux through Proton 4.11.
I tried running Deus Ex in safe mode, but the game still crashed.

There is a fix here:

• Start the game using the -hax0r parameter in the launch options. This enables cheat mode.
• In-game, using the console, press t, remove the say that's entered by default on a new command line, and type playersonly. This will freeze all other entities, only to temporarily prevent them from running right into problems again, giving you more time to terminate the buggy entity.
• Type killall deusex.terrorist to eliminate the faulty entities in your current game.
• Type playersonly again to resume normal play.

Alternatively, try out the replacement executable (neatly named Deus Exe) from that same link.