Can confirm, connection stability became much worse after S5 dropped. At least once in every match, everything will freeze around me for 5-10 seconds, and half of the times I end up getting a connection error. During the freezing I am still online (websites open normally).

Two of my friends are also reporting the same issue (either when we play together or in random online lobbies), and I do not have any connection issues in other games.

I've been experiencing that as well. For months now.

the only solution that worked for me(steam):
-monitor the IPs of the steam servers you are using each time you get lag or disconnected
-Ensure the specific IPs are failing to receive/send data from/to you a few times(maybe 5 or so) so you don't get a false positive
-Block the offending IPs on your firewall so the game can't access them

some(or a lot of) context:
DRG had a thread for months on their discord(possibly season 4, maybe 3?), and a developer encouraged people to test in a room and later with the network test beta version of the game, aside from specific connection issues that a fewer number of players had, I don't think they ever showed a conclusion for the lag/disconnection issues

During that time I started having issues too, it happened in 5-30% of the games depending on day of the week and time of the day, and I had mostly long lags(5-28~ seconds long) but also some disconnections, if I tried to host games it seemed like other people had the issues at similar rates

Seeing no results from their investigation I started capturing DRG packets, video and keeping track of the lag details for around a month. It then took me maybe two or three weeks to decode/analyze the packet data to my satisfaction but a clear pattern emerged, only a few servers were sending/receiving data to/from me when the issues happened, I took the problematic servers(IPs) and blocked DRG from accessing them with my firewall, everything worked great after that

Steam will ping several steam servers(20+) and users LAN/WAN IPs before choosing one to use(the server selection will mostly happen more than once per game, and you will hop servers now and then which is usually transparent to the users), blocking servers seemed unlikely to cause issues as I rarely saw more than one problematic server being pinged at a time

After some months I started having a few lag issues again, this time I didn't have captures so I just kept my firewall connections window open and wrote down the servers that were sending/receiving data when the lags happened, after a few lags I found the culprit and added the IP to the blocked ones, this solved the issue

My guess is that my list of blocked servers won't be useful for other people because different regions and ISPs, so a server that gives me lag might be great for someone else

Thank you for the insight! Sadly this workaround looks rather complicated to me, and I'm not even sure how to track the faulty servers in the first place, but I will take a look into it when I have more time.

Since it sounds like an issue with Steam's servers, perhaps it would be worth sending this information to a Steam support agent? And do you think that anything could be done on the game's side to help mitigate this? For instance, retrying more times to establish a connection before disconnecting a player, or at least a quick rejoin feature.

@McMasterGold you might be right, I guess I just became somewhat hopeless after spending so much time on this and maybe assumed that if I found the issue then DRG could have found it easily, and if there was no mention of it then it meant they can't or won't do anything about it.
I'll try to contact steam the next time I find a problematic IP