Yes, there may be some other problems with your defined network. Because in almost all of the VAE papers, Conv2d and TransposedConv2d has been used for changing channel size and dimension at the same time and it will work fine if training procedure goes well.
The reason is that maxpooling is a simple operation and a Conv2d matrix can learn weights to even put more attention on some particular features. I think UNet is the big example that works very well in different tasks.
Good luck