The issue is likely to be caused by WT-8591 (1e91ea). Insert stalls happened in every trial with 1e191ea, and did not happen with the commit before (49edd4). The stalls coincide with a high eviction empty score, dirty fill ratio, and pages selected because of too many deleted items count. The same issue is observed on the 5.2 branch starting on Dec 30 when WT-8591 was merged on that branch.
Three more test runs