the I/O should really be minimal which is what's baffling
I've looked through the 2.17.0 release notes and sorentwo mentioned disabling the insert trigger functionality completely in config if "sub-second job execution isn't important." That should disable the insert trigger functionality that I suspected of the increased I/O and revert to polling only. After changing that with config :pleroma, Oban, insert_trigger: false the I/O did not change in any way. Still the same behavior. At this point I'm kinda lost at what the issue might be.
The documentation and release notes also mention different reasons for disabling the trigger:
https://github.com/sorentwo/oban/releases/tag/v2.17.0
https://hexdocs.pm/oban/v2-17.html#disable-insert-notifications-optional
I've also skimmed through Ecto and Postgrex GitHub issues and didn't find anything meaningful that mentioned increased I/O or Oban.