Anki "processing..." between every single review

I wanted to share a link to show what’s going on. This 60 second video shows me reviewing about 5 cards, with processing… popping up randomly between some of them.

This basically makes it impossible for me to do reviews efficiently. It throws off my tempo and distracts me.

Someone else asked something similar: Anki processing bar appear constantly after every card - #2 by Danika_Dakika and the only applicable answer for me would be “your pc may be busy doing other work” is there some way to diagnose or identify if this is the case?

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/191p95o/anki_23121_update_cards_lagging/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/195xw2y/anki_lag_issuestarted_today/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/19ehb30/anki_lag_after_updating/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/18u5gv7/anki_lagging_when_showing_front_andor_back_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/m7364k/anki_became_laggy/

here are some posts with other people experiencing a similar issue, all starting around the same time as when this started happening to me