Hi,
The goal with UE5 was to properly scale (remove limitations) and reduce preemption for systems with lots of core. Having more threads than core is not good for a task graph in general so everything was merged together so that the task graph would run optimally on high core count systems.
That being said, long running tasks are not friendly to a task graph. In your specific case, we suggest that you create your own thread-pool and issue your blocking ping request or long running tasks on that thread-pool.
Ideally, you would use non-blocking APIs to accomplish the same goal which would not require having a separate thread-pool, but obviously it requires more work.
Hope this helps,
Danny