Nature of Ansible's "Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt" error

Ansible can occasionally fail with the following error: 'Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt'. At some point I wanted to finally learn exactly what this 'privilege escalation prompt timeout' is, where I can change its value and where it says that it defaults to 12 seconds. Clearly it relates to sudo (or other become mechanism), but I could not find anything about it in Ansible…