I found another thread that mentioned the same form of issues:
It seems like Plex is not equipped to handle these larger libraries (all of mine are over several TB). I did eventually switch back to Docker, and run the PRAGMA command, and that has sorted it out.
I no longer am receiving the database lockups, and plex is (as far as I can see) running without issue. There is a slightly higher RAM usage, but, I can easily take that compared to the DB lockups and freezing.
The only other alternative I see (seeing as I am not getting a lot of comments on VMware forums), is to create a new VMDK that is roughly the same size, move everything over, and then start plex back up again and see if it that solves).
Unless the filesystem is not tuned properly (which it seems like it is).
