I ran some further tests and did not face the issue. In each case (5.10, 5.15, 5.15 including pr10123) I sticked to building plain OpenWrt (without the packages feed) and only added kmod-sctp compared to the defaults.
I'll now try to perform some further tests with the packages feed ... hopefully I manage to narrow it down even further.
I think I found the problem ... 100% my fault. It seems one should update and install the packages feeds after modifying the kernel config. When first modifying the kernel config and then updating and installing the packages feeds I faced the issue ... in reverse order not. Very strange. Anyway, now everything works.