Cannot activate flasks during FPS drops

My PC (in particular, CPU) is rather old and this often causes FPS drops when there are many monsters, skill effects, etc on screen. Before 3.26 I was able to mostly tolerate this and play anyway.

Since 3.26 though, whenever the game gets particularly stuttery, it becomes nearly impossible for me to activate my life flask: I can watch my life orb drain from enemies hitting me (in jerky slow-motion), hammer my flask keybind, and watch it simply not activate. On the rare occasions where my input does go through I usually survive.

Steps to reproduce:
- fish an old PC that just barely runs PoE out of a dumpster. Perhaps a bad internet connection will also work.
- To ensure the game actually does lag, play a spammy build. Toxic rain ballistas work great for me.
- Enter a map and find a mob pack, or a tough rare, or a mercenary. Really, any encounter that can kill you might do.
- Start the encounter. Watch your FPS drop and observe the F1 display show high CPU usage.
- Lose some life from the enemies hitting you.
- Press the keybind for your life flask.
- Watch as nothing happens.

The issue is intermittent, but quite frequent.

My speculation is that in these situations, the (new to 3.26) pause-when-lag-detected feature kicks in, which means the inputs to activate the life flask arrive while the game is paused, and so they are dropped.

Having the same issue, I noticed it only when I started doing juiced content, t is quite annoying for me, specially because I'm running pathfinder with Master Surgeon + Replica Sorrow of the Divine to keep the energy shield full. When the life flask effect ends, I'm unnable to cast anything and have to run away from the fight just to use the flask again.

i have old laptop with few fps here too, but im playing since 2013, so i already know how to deal and got some fun with few fps...

but since 3.26 launchs, its worst than ever, totally unplayable =\