I wish they would have explored what some of the commenters noted: does it happen when you position OBS such that it has to recursively capture itself? (The feed contains a picture of the feed which contains a picture of the feed which …)

It seemed like some positions, it would handle 2-4 recursions okay, but the positions where it had to do infinite recursions were the ones that the frame-rate plummeted.

Recursion would have nothing to do with it. Recursive capture does not add any load, it just looks weird.

It looks like whenever the scene, source, and audio panels on the bottom of the window are on screen but in the background the frame times become choppy.

I experienced a similar thing while testing it. Had it on another monitor with an app in full screen and it just locked onto a single frame.

Wish Jon didn't bash so much and contributed to the project instead :(