I've published hundreds of apps over the past 6 years and Google's review times had a similar spike during covid. It took a very long time to recover but now it's back to being bad, I can confirm that.

I wrote about it a while ago, might be time to upsate that post. https://webtoapp.design/blog/time-to-publish-apps

Hang on. You've published hundreds of apps? As in the same thing slightly modified several times?