I got the same error: Netbeans than hangs when deploying on Apache Tomcat. I found out that the version of Java of my application was not supported by the version of Tomcat I was trying to deploy into. In particular, I was trying to deploy a Java 8 (also known as Java 1.8) JSP application into Tomcat 11.

Then I checked the Apache Tomcat compatibility list: https://tomcat.apache.org/whichversion.html and found out that Java 8 was supported until Apache Tomcat 9.0.x. I downloaded then Tomcat 9, configured in the Netbeans Servers (via the menu Tools->Servers), and the application was deployed successfully.