I asked in the Factorio discord last night and posted screenshots with some debug info. I was told we should not have vsync on and that would limit our FPS so we both turned it off. The periodic slowdowns stopped happening. I enabled vsync on my machine and we still did not experience the slowing so it is only the host machine that needs vsync disabled.
This is not a FPS issue though. Our graphics always ran smoothly, it was just like the game speed was half of what it normally was.
My husband and I are both running macOS Ventura. His machine is an M2 Max chip and mine is an M1 Pro chip. Our son connects to the game with a Windows PC. We have logged hundreds of hours in multiplayer games before using these systems and never seen this issue until the past week.
I have attached some debug info from last night when the game was running slowly for us and when it was running normally.
pics