Turns out a keyboard dropping keystrokes is a surefire way to make me panic
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 :(
@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
@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