S3221QS, black screen, replacement fix the issue

I bought my S3221QS monitor a few months ago. Delightful, works without issue connected via DP to my XPS 8930 running Windows 11. Until today, when all of a sudden it started blanking the screen to black for a second or two and doing this every 10-30 seconds.

At the time I was updating the Nvidia studio graphics driver to a new version 472.47 using the Nvidia GForce Experience app. The app was running the pre-install stage (downloading the driver install package) when the blanking started, so the actual update process hadn't yet started. It didn't interfere with anything, and the update happened without issue so the new driver is now installed.

And the blanking has stopped.

In peeking at the Event Viewer to see if there are any clues there, I noticed two identical entries for two app crashes for the Dell Display Manager version 1.54.0.2068 which runs from when the PC starts up. I've not touched this app so it's using whatever defaults there are.

As far as I can tell, the crashes happened after the Nvidia driver update completed. The entries are a bit bare bones, but say this:

Faulting application name: ddm.exe, version: 1.54.0.2068, time stamp: 0x2a425e19
Faulting module name: ddm.exe, version: 1.54.0.2068, time stamp: 0x2a425e19
Exception code: 0xc000041d
Fault offset: 0x00135f8a
Faulting process ID: 0x5630
Faulting application start time: 0x01d7e157eda6b221
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe
Report ID: bc21eccb-c394-4562-a67e-f55ad6764420
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Nothing here gives me any clue as to why DDM crashed.

All I know now is that, since the crashes and therefore DDM not running, I have experienced no further blanking and black screens. All back to normal.

Does the DDM app have any essential use? I don't feel inclined to run it again and most likely I'll uninstall it. The monitor works perfectly fine without it.