A joke!!!

I wonder how on earth a plugin tha promises to optimize the wp_options tables, stores 25MB of data in the option_value !!!!

Maybe the guy who developed it does not understand the fundamentals of the internal database optimizers but such a huge deviation, totally ruins MariaDBs/MySQL internal optimizer. You see optimizers work on the assumption that in a table, the fields have somewhat related sizes.

For more details please go to MariaDB Jira and check for cases MDEV-34097 and MDEV 32663

If you add records with huge sizes (say > 100k) in wp_options table where each option is usually less than 30Bytes, then you have an issue. In our case the issue was caused by the very plugin that we used to monitor our options (that are by and large incorrect).

Avoid it at all costs.