Intellij bundeled plugin: Remote Execution Agent - freezing/crashing IDE

PHPStorm started freezing when opening projects on my WSL instance. The loading spinner comes up and then freezes. I couldn't find any related errors in the log files, but I'm not very skilled when searching these extremely verbose logs. This was a long processes of trial and error.

New strange behavior:
In home dir on \\wsl I could not open any project folders with or without the .idea folder present, I could not open an empty folder, but I could open newly created individual files as long as there was not a .idea folder, or for example ~/.zshrc. 

Copying the project folders from \\wsl to C: worked and would not crash the IDE

All other Windows apps could read, write, delete files/folders on \\wsl

What I tried:
Searching log for SEVRE or failed, I'm not sure if an error message was even being produced?

The usual Repair IDE, Invalidate Caches, increasing VM memory, deleting .idea folders, deleting APPDATA folder, disabling downloaded plugins, reset to default settings, un/reinstalling PHPStorm, and none of that worked.
 

What worked: 

I had to disable ALL plugins and finally I could open everything again on WSL. I enabled blocks of plugins at a time and would test and found it came down to one bundled plugin:

Remote Execution Agent v 252.23892.419 with the overview mentioning “An experimental remote-side application for launching processes and making tunnels to WSL, SSH, Docker, etc”

I'm pretty sure I'm not using this plugins functionality in any way but it's strange that it's a bundled plugin and it started crashing the IDE.

Is Remote Execution Agent a legit plugin?
Has anyone else had issues with this plugin?

Any advice would be helpful.

Thank you.