After upgrading to 14.4.1, spawning lots of processing results in perceived rate limiting

As a programmer I sometimes run scripts which end up spawning lots of processes. For example, I have a maven (java build tool) which can fork out to many prettier scripts to check files for proper spacing.

Before upgrading to MacOS 14.4.1, I haven't noticed any issues running many processes, as long as my total number of concurrent processes (my ulimit says that's 10,666). After upgrading, whenever I run a process spawning intensive task, forking slows to a crawl.

E.g.:

user:/$ time /bin/sh -c 'echo test'
test

real	0m9.035s
user	0m0.004s
sys	0m0.012s

I don't know if there's a new security feature to prevent fork bombing that's been part of the release, but as part of my profession I need to find a way to disable it.