I took a look through the logs and I see immediately before ~20 second delay in file IO requests an open request for the Microsoft SMB server named pipe to our VMware Shared Folder server name (\\vmware-host\PIPE\srvsvc). This is suspicious and I don't see this in my usage and could be the cause of why the remote folder access gets delayed at this point.
I will try and investigate this further.
Thanks for providing these logs it is very helpful.