I’ve recently done a clean install of Windows, and I took it as an opportunity to fix the dumb mistake I’ve made with using special characters and spaces when naming the Windows account
The Player’s working much better now, and ping seems to be much more stable. I strongly suspect that the issue was caused due to the special characters in my file path causing issues with one of the Player’s updates
Essentially: Don’t repeat the same mistake that I did. Avoid using symbols, spaces, and unicode characters in critical file paths, otherwise you will encounter issues
(Studio is a bit unhappy since updating to 24H2, though 
)