I can confirm we are also experiencing the same issue. Due to our use of command blocks we've rolled back to 17w18b, and all is working perfectly (same server, same user count/load, same world).
Anything newer than pre2 causes lag and tick skips to increase with time until the server shuts down due to ticks taking too long.
It seems there are other reports too.. MC-117691 and MC-117748
Still an issue in 1.13-pre10.
I have a single server running, with one player logged on, on an entire dedicated box - Intel i7-7700k @ 5GHz, 64GB RAM and NVMe storage - and I'm seeing the same issues.