I've had similar lags & freezes recently. for up to 30 seconds at time, in media heavy directory's [movies and music etc].
i did a manual crash dump to send to the devlopers, it turns out it was being caused by background processes from dbpoweramp, a media converter, which was trying to read the content to populate its own column meta.
here's the email that helped me fix this...
Those snapshots suggest the delay might be caused by dBShell.dll, dbPowerAmp's shell extension for adding custom columns.
(They're added using an old API which File Explorer no longer supports, so the DLL itself may not be maintained/tested much these days, since almost nothing would use it. Opus still supports that type of column, however.)
If you're using Opus 13, go to Preferences / Miscellaneous / Shell Extensions, type dBShell.dll into the search field above the list of extensions, and block any that match. Click OK, then use File > Exit Directory Opus from the main window to restart the process. If that fixes things, it confirms the issue was there.
Leo
I've other programs cause "stutters" as well, usually just momentary till a reboot or closing a resource hog of a process.
best luck finding the culprit!