I tried to replicate my Debian servers setting on it:
/etc/ssh/ssh_config
SendEnv LANG LC_*
HashKnownHosts yes
GSSAPIAuthentication yes
/etc/ssh/sshd_config
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
UsePAM yes
X11Forwarding yes
PrintMotd no
And nope, same delay
I basically did a copy/paste of this settings and nope: Problem with ssh server on rocky 8.5
I did shut the VM down to make there is no network conflict even so I mentioned I don’t believe this is a network issue and as expected, same thing.