Turns out a keyboard dropping keystrokes is a surefire way to make me panic
@tindall ohhh I hate this so much. I believe it has to do with thermal throttling on thunderbolt when you are charging and using accessories on the same side of the macbook.
Discovered that when I was looking into crazy kernel_task CPU usage from this SE thread here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find-cause-of-high-kernel-task-cpu-usage
@tindall Since I have 2 monitors hooked up via tb->displayport and a usb-c hub, I've had to just live with the occasional stutter or point a fan at the damn thing if I'm running something intensive.
@tindall By any chance is your dock a Lenovo?
@spicytamazon Nope, it's a CalDigit.
@tindall I hated that so much when I was running my laptop off an eGPU dock with some other USB devices plugged in to it.
@tindall what the _what_?!?
@tindall have this problem with my eGPU. So annoying to have this giant TB3 hub and still have to plug the keyboard directly into the laptop
My thunderbolt dock was dropping USB packets on the USB 3 bus! With the same devices on the same hub plugged directly into a type-C port, it works fine; via the T3 dock it was dropping keystrokes and audio packets :(