This issue still happens for me. With and without VPN, with both OpenVPN and Wireguard. With and without filtering (mostly with filters though, both LuLu and Little Snitch). On two different machines, M1 and M3. It's random.
If I have to bet, there's a deadlock caused by running x86 code on Arm hardware. As a software engineer I saw cases where Intel tolerates bad multI-threading more than Arm.
Are the Apple devs working on this? This is a very serious issue that makes these very expensive laptop unusable!
At least provide a way to reset the network stack!