Cellular Vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) communication is a major V2X solution proposed and developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Our previous work has studied scalability aspects of C-V2X and demonstrated its potential for accommodating large numbers of vehicles in dense vehicular scenarios. However, existing studies in the scientific literature mostly have a network-level approach to the problem and do not assess the temporal and spatial dynamics of C-V2X networks in heavy network load situations. In this work we shed light on the spatio-temporal characteristics of these networks and investigate the effectiveness of the congestion control algorithm in dense vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) in terms of settling time, stability, and reliability to be employed for the purpose of safety-critical vehicular applications, where latency plays a major role.