Why does the loading screen freeze at 99% when crossing regions?

I was so excited to explore the Zone, but the loading bar would freeze at 99% for ten seconds every time I crossed a region. I tried disabling all background sync services in Windows, but loading time only decreased by 1 second, making the process torture. I used GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Configuration to lock concurrent read/writes at 64 and enabled low-latency mode. RTSS showed loading spikes dropped from 100ms to 25ms, HWInfo confirmed temps at 55-62℃, and AIDA64 noted the read queue was 256+.