Elasticbeanstalk command line deploy has suddenly become VERY slow

I have been using eb deploy to deploy my Node app on elastic beanstalk for 1 year+. It normally takes a few minutes. Suddenly, a few days ago, it became VERY slow (~20 minutes). And running the command with --verbose shows it's spending all of this time packaging the zip file.

To be clear:

eb deploy                                                
Alert: The platform version that your environment is using isn't recommended. There's a recommended version in the same platform branch.

Creating application version archive "app-4c72-4566829_232321".

(WAIT ~20 minutes - normally this was VERY fast. Perhaps instantaneous. When I run with --verbose, I can see it slowly crawling my directory tree and adding files. I have some files in .ebignore but even crawling normal files is very slow like a second or two per file)

This part seems normal / fast:

Upload Complete.
2023-03-24 20:26:20    INFO    Environment update is starting.
2023-03-24 20:26:26    INFO    Deploying new version to instance(s).
2023-03-24 20:27:15    INFO    Instance deployment completed successfully.
2023-03-24 20:27:20    INFO    New application version was deployed to running EC2 instances.
2023-03-24 20:27:20    INFO    Environment update completed successfully.

One thing I noticed is I am running Node.js 16 running on 64bit Amazon Linux 2/5.6.0 and it looks like there is a new platform version (5.7) available. Could the release of this new version have caused this?