Android doing too much work on its main thread when collecting Flow

Question

I have a local database function that returns the list of users in Flow format. Flow<List<User>>. The home screen only displays the latest list of users. When launching the app and pre-populating the database the flow receives the empty list first and then the updated list as the pre-population completes.

This is causing the Android to do too much work on its main thread and skipping the frames to render.

viewModelScope.launch {
 dao.getUsers().collect {
   userList.value = it
 }
}