Why does Enshrouded freeze at 85% during loading?

I was so hyped for this game, but entering mist areas caused the loading bar to hang at 85% for seconds. I first tried enabling write cache flushing in the system, but that caused terrible mouse drift and system lag. I finally used the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to increase depth from 32 to 256 and optimized power management. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K reads jumping from 55MB/s to 88MB/s, random read latency hit 22-48ms via CrystalDiskMark, and temps dropped to 52-60℃ per HWiNFO.