Well, I sort of stumbled upon the solution in this answer
For this particular case, the issue was the anti-aliasing method in the “Rendering” section of the project settings.
The default AA method is “Temporal Super-Resolution (TSR)”. By changing it to FXAA, the motion blur is gone from the render target. I even removed motion blur changes on my scene capture 2D component and removed the post process volume and still looks fantastic.
Hope this is useful should anyone run into this issue.