Why does my Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB cause instant freezes during fast travel in AC Valhalla?

While exploring the depths of the Norwegian wilderness, my Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB hit a wall, causing obvious stepped stutters during scene transitions. I noticed 4K random read latency peaking between 16ms - 30ms via CrystalDiskMark, which completely trashed the game engine's frame synchronization. I first tried enabling write cache flushing in Windows, but that was a nightmare—it didn't stop the freezes and actually caused a 2-second hang every time I saved. Total waste of time. I then dove into the GamePP NVMe Queue Depth Config, bumping the queue depth from the default 32 up to 128 while optimizing the IRQ priority.